The Best American Poetry

The Year in Review: The Other Latin@: A Q & A with Blas Falconer by Emma Trelles (April 12, 2012)

The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity is an anthology of 20 essays that, according to its co-editor Blas Falconer, aims to counter a narrow perspective of Latino/a writers and honor their diversity. In his own essay, Falconer writes, "When Spanish enters the poem, it is often done because it is part of the memory, not because it is the language of the reader or of the audience."

This idea of how Spanish is mysteriously fused to the neurons of Latino writers resonated with me, and I wanted to hear more from Blas.  He and co-editor Lorraine Lopez will present the book this Thursday, April 26, at noon, as part of the Books and Beyond series at the Library of Congress in partnership with Letras Latinas and the University of Arizona Press. At 6:30 p.m., both Falconer and Lopez will read selections from their own work. For details, visit here.

ET: What was the source of inspiration for this anthology, for the idea that Latino writers are more than a globbed together demographic or a brightly colored (I'm guessing red) wedge in a pie graph?

BF: The book began, in part, as a presentation on an AWP panel I wrote in 2008. The acquisitions editor from University of Arizona Press was in the audience and came up to me afterwards and suggested we do a whole book. I told her I was thinking the exact same thing. We wanted to open it up beyond the Latino identity that's been seen through a small lens.

The book also originated from the fact that I didn't really understand my own relationship to the Latino community or to Puerto Rico. I had traveled there a lot when I was younger, but after my grandmother passed away I stopped going. I also knew that there was this rich Puerto Rican community in New York that I didn't feel quite in sync with because I grew up in Northern Virginia, and there just weren't a lot of Puerto Ricans there. As a writer, I kept asking myself, ‘Am I Latino?’ ‘What does it mean to be Latino?’ I have a white father and a Latina mother, but I have an estranged relationship to Puerto Rico. What does this mean? Then I realized that I saw two of my dearest friends as Latinas - Lisa Chavez, a Chicana from Alaska, and Helena Mesa, who is Cuban and grew up in Pittsburgh - even though they too felt disconnected. I thought, ‘Let's explore this.’ I realized that many writers were challenging the term of Latino in various ways, and I thought reading about their experiences might be interesting.

Another source of inspiration is that sometimes I just don't want to write. I'm on empty. But I'm still fueled by great poetry or writing, so I want to be involved somehow. Editing kind of satisfies that need. Seeing how different people write, how their work or books come together. It's inspiring.            

ET: How did you seek out writers? What was the criteria for submissions?                                                             

BF: The press asked me to widen the scope to include fiction writers, and I asked Lorraine Lopez to be my co-editor. We started thinking about the Latino experience and the Latino identity, and we wanted writers that subverted stereotypical topics -- food, grandmothers, estrangement and exile, urban life. We wanted to push beyond this and see what was next.                 (at right, Blas Falconer)        

ET: What's funny is that all those topics are in the book!

BF: It's totally true. But Lisa Chavez, who's from Alaska, isn't writing about the expected Chicana experience. In his essay, Steven Cordova  basically says, ‘I'm Latino, but I'm HIV positive and gay, and it doesn't mean I'm not Latino or addressing issues of otherness, but I'm doing that through this other aspect of my identity, through this other narrative.' 

In terms of aesthetics, Carmen Gimenez Smith and Gabe Gomez call on Latino poets to explore what might be considered experimental methods of articulating the Latino experience, which often relies heavily on narrative. So those topics are there, but they’re approached in many different ways.

ET: As an editor, do you find it challenging to reject work?

BF: I do. To be honest, we did have to pass on a few essays because there were a couple of times where they were redundant in subject matter. Another one was more for an academic journal in terms of what the press wanted for our imagined reader. No one submitted a bad essay, but some of them just didn't fit. It was hard because we didn't invite anyone to submit that we didn't really admire as writers.

ET: The tone of the essays in this book varies widely: "Latina Enough," by Stephanie Elizondo Griest is witty as well as reflective. In "When We Were Spanish," your co-editor Lorraine Lopez offers a kind of personalized scholarship. Did you both deliberately attempt to include a gamut of styles or did it just turn out that way?

BF: It kind of did just turn out that way. We were interested in not only the ideas in the essays but also in their craft. And we weren't just asking anyone to contribute; we were asking writers. So we encouraged them to write in the manner they felt best addressed their subjects. Gina Franco's essay is much more lyric, for example. It's a stunning essay and very complex in the way she addresses issues of identity.. Some were more academic, such as Peter Ramos’ essay, which had more of a rooting in the American cannon, more of an academic slant. And that was good too.

ET: In "Coyotes," Alex Espinoza writes about speaking at community colleges and remembering how he also sat at a workshop, at University of California, Irvine, and at the same table as Gary Soto and Helena Viramontes. What is the role mentorship plays in understanding identity?

BF: In my own essay, I kind of address this. When I started reading Rane Arroyo and Judith Ortiz Cofer, I thought, ‘Oh these writers are like me in some way.’ But they were able to find their own voices and incorporate their cultural influences. They were doing what I wanted to do, and I saw them as legitimate Latino writers. It was a way in for me. I realized I am also a part of this community. In that sense I saw them as models.

When my first book came out, I felt an incredibly nurturing response from the Latino community that I had never expected. Even today, five years after my first book was published, I still feel welcome and there's no question I'm part of this community. It made me feel as if my own experience was legitimate, and it's resolved this kind of conflict of estrangement I've had. I’m grateful to the Latino community for embracing diversity within itself.

ET: How do you as a Puerto Rican and Latino poet feel or do not feel marginalized?

BF: You know, I don't feel marginalized. I feel like everyone has had that experience of being "the other." I don't care if you're a straight white man; you've felt that sense of otherness. I don't feel any more marginalized than other people do at different times in their lives. I don't think I'm going to be denied a job or not be published or be dismissed because I'm a Latino writer. I don't think I'm going to be ignored. Maybe it's a testament to the strides the Latino writing community has made in publishing. Of course, I've experienced bigotry in my life as a gay man and as a Latino, but I'm not looking over my shoulder or waiting for the next person to shut a door in my face. But other people have had, and still do have, that experience, and I know that it happens.

Poet Spotlight: Brenna Womer [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Brenna Womer is a prose writer and poet in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University, where she teaches creative writing, literature, and composition as well as serves as an associate editor of Passages North. Her work has appeared in The Normal School, Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, Pleiades, and elsewhere, and she is the author of honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance (C&R Press, 2018).

___________________________________________________

Artist’s Statement

I think utilizing the craft of textual difficulty, in its limitless forms, is essential for contemporary poets and prose writers. Obviously, stream-of-consciousness has been a part of the mainstream for some time now and paved the way for writers like myself who intend for the aesthetics of some pieces to weigh as heavily as the text itself. In my piece “Hypochondria, or The Disease,” I rely on the difficulty of the formatting to evoke a sense of anxiety in the reader as they decipher some of my personal experiences with debilitating mental illness; the reader has to work a bit harder for the narrative. I’ve been told the piece is frustrating and exhausting, which isn’t language typically attributed to successful work, but in the case of this particular piece as well as some of my other creative nonfiction and poetry, it’s exactly the point. I like to think of it as an exercise in empathy.

____________________________________________________

A Folio of New Writing by Brenna Womer

company

 

put on a show
for me
he asks
while I ride
on top
and wonder
what it is
he thinks
I’m doing
now
does he
think I mash
my own breasts
and pinch
nipples hard
and red and
raw at home
alone
with my dogs
watching
he asks
tell me what
you really want
tell me where
you want it
but I want
to go back
to the couch
and eat
my cold
bagel but
I know he
has to
come before
I get
my everything
toasted
with plain
cream cheese

______________________________________

tenure

 

I trade my body for good company       or company     more often than not           but professor doesn’t see me in the hallway               copy room             elevator           parking lot doesn’t see me      if my tit’s not in his mouth     when his red stag isn’t dribble down my chin    and sticky     to the leather of his couch like my grandparents’ couch        the family I don’t call family because         they only love me during second service       vacation bible school          bless this food and the women who prepared it a family by any other name         is a sexual history an untethered novelty             so I ask him about his parents but of course            they’re dead of course         because professor is so many years of being             a white man in this world               in this grad-student pussy             is sixty-five years of asking       let’s go to the bedroom    

     and I am forty fewer of   okay

___________________________________

 

slow burn

 

my age always closer to the scotch in his glass       
we slow-dance     
next to the pool table
he asks me follow but I   
can’t didn’t don’t   
know how and his arms are rigid and his hand
too firm at my waist his fingers
like a trowel in my stubborn soil but he keeps
his eyes closed because it doesn’t need to be me       
“me and mrs jones” and my uncooperative           body           always taking up more space than
it should
                 he asks again just follow damnit       but I’m drunk on light beer and can’t make any more
or less of myself            and I know he has a wife at home       that they sleep in separate beds and her name is Gretchen    but I’m in a sundress and a fresh twenty-one while his cheek is
whisker-burn against my own                                         like my father’s when he used to kiss me
goodnight

_______________________________________

Thanks to The Rumpus, where these poems first appeared.  

Poet Spotlight: Elizabeth Powell [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Elizabeth Powell is the author of The Republic of Self, a New Issue First Book Prize winner, selected by C.K. Williams. Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances was a 2016 New Yorker Books We Love, a Small Press Best Seller, and won the 2015 Anhinga Robert Dana Prize, selected by Maureen Seaton. Her novel Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, will be released in Spring 2019. Her work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2013, Ecotone, The Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Sugarhouse Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Johnson State College. She also serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

A Process Note

All poetry is physics, is a theology of being and thingyness, is transformative narrative. I am attracted to hybrid form as a way to push the imagination into new ways of thinking and seeing. The imagination is what helps to express what is difficult or unseen and begin to understand how its creative stance can revolt against status quo of American consumerism. There is a strong link between social justice and experimental prose and the hybrid lyric essay/poem because the power of the imaginative/spiritual/dream propulsion of writing is beginning to move us away from the old ways of seeing that no longer serve. The creative force is that which has the power to free. My lyric hybrid novel, “Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues” explores how that redemptive idea interfaces with and investigates the consumerism and desire so rampant in American culture. I employ a pastiche of forms from disparate places such as a JCrew catalogue to the Book of Common Prayer. The book looks, in part, at the intersections of conservative evangelical misogyny, the new cult of domesticity (that is fashioned, in part, out of the idea of retro), and the social drive of the American advertisement and consumer system of belief.  My book thinks about creative force as prophecy, as the muse of history, as spiritual guide, as metaphor, as structural device, and, ultimately, as resistance.
__________________________________________________

A Folio of New Writing by Elizabeth Powell 

AUTOCORRECTING THE LYRIC I

 

I keep autocorrecting myself. I don’t want to autocorrect myself. I autocorrect when I don’t want to autocorrect. It disturbs the fusion of my interior monologue. I cannot keep up with how fast things are changing. If I use autocorrect I am more suitable for you to see. I am dressed. I am not as naked as my fast typing might insist.

Autocorrection is a kind of conspiracy theory of reality based on the probability of words and un-nimble fingers. Thought is more easily rendered when you autocorrect, so it is said. But I know I am made from a God that makes homemade bread in the desert, even if He doesn’t have yeast. I am not made of touchscreen typing, though it is didactic consideration. My fusion is a kind of Cupertino, inserted into the narrative even though it was never meant to be there. Yet, autocorrection is supposed reduce the probability I am wrong to you in the way Cary Grant never seems wrong to anyone.

When I autocorrect myself, it is better than back when I merely erased myself. There are many ways of erasure: deletion, drunk and disorderly, disintegration. Acting is a favored mode, and that’s why I like theater, drama, monologue. I’ve had practice passing as a Jew and passing as a WASP because my math teacher explained that I am what used to be called in New York, a Mic-Moc, though I am not Irish. I have become kind of good at doing this passing, though the one identity is always trying to autocorrect the other. Can you guess which parent of mine is a Jew? A Gentile?

Let’s say I’m fusion of cold borscht and finger sandwiches on white. I’m matzo ball Jew Bagel and thrifty Campbell’s soup with dried parsley don’t worry about me luncheon. I’m noodle kugel and I’m turkey divan casserole. I’m Bubbeleh and I’m Dearie. I’m Ma and I’m Mummy. I’m the Episcojew, and I am strong and not strong! I have a family tartan and a silence in the Vilnius ghetto. I cannot be buried in the holy land, but I cannot be cremated. I am passing and have passed, heard the murmurs   of lovely   & also…Dirty Jews, Fucking Gentiles. I have paid close attention to speech and learned how to autocorrect instantly. As quickly as fire, which used to follow me around like a strange cat. Fire on the Amtrak from DC to NYC, fire in the living room burning the shag rug, Fire on the Mountain at the Dead Shows.

Now, I just keep turning my words into something else beside fire like someone with a personality disorder trying to make everything look good! It is humbling and uncool, but I keep trying to fill in the blank of myself with words that keep changing. It is better, the Boston Brahmins say, to have a history not a past, so when I speak in the “I’ it must be my Jewish side, when I say that I am a vaudeville act in a quiet New England house. I’m the Daughter of the American Revolution in third class steerage.

I’m the debutante in the Pogrom. I’m a morpher like autocorrection. I have tried to make myself acceptable to both sides. Literally.

I am an Elizabeth…I autocorrect into an   electric   elsewhere

I am also Ann                And   Another

Powell to     Power   to Pose  

In Hebrew my name would be Bathsheba Bat Label

Bathsheba    becomes      Banshee, Battery

Also, I am delighted: Cary Grant was Jewish & Cary Grant was Church of England. He was perhaps the

Poet Spotlight: Virginia Konchan [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

This week, as Guest Author, I will be spotlighting innovative work by women poets in the form of new writing and review-essays.  Today I'm delighted to share a folio of poems by Virginia Konchan.  The author of a poetry collection, The End of Spectacle (Carnegie Mellon, 2018), a collection of short stories, Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017), and two chapbooks, including That Tree is Mine (dancing girl press, 2018), Virginia Konchan's poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Boston Review, and elsewhere.  Happy summer, and enjoy!  

 

 

A Folio of Poems by Virginia Konchan

 

Spring

Out of view, more galaxies.
Out of time, more light. A naturalist
or archeologist can decipher symptoms,
messages engraved in the flesh
of ordinary things. When the engine begins
to purr again, the crowd applauds.
Lord of tissue, lord of hieroglyphs
and a puzzle full of theological quibbles,
it’s prettiness that counts in china dolls. 
Lord of allegory, of hidden meanings,
of radical fissures in the heart of rain,
I have a skeleton underneath my skin, 
I am serious. I careen through the house
like a killer. Lord knows I tried, like a dove,
to mate for life. I failed. It was the trash,
the detritus, I adored. No images but in things.
No things but in images. There could have been
so many versions of us, why this one?
Love will creep where it cannot go,
through the eyes of the dead horse
that burns slower than my hair.
It’s spring—meta chirp, meta chirp,
goes the bird, philosopher’s stone.
It is a conduit between what was,
will be. It is, like everyone, alone.

 

_________

 

Guiding Light

I wasted my life on language
and other soft constructions,
held the clammy hand of death
as if death was the snot-nosed kid
last to be picked for any team
where skill actually matters.
I could be a bride, and was,
was bridled, harnessed, and
groomed. Now I live in, and by,
a burning timetable, abetting
the landfill crisis by buying
ream after ream of paper.
The bright white paper.
The laser paper.
The paper whose opacity
rivals that of God.
I indicate I would like
the dessert menu by pointing to it
with my bony finger.
When it comes, I order a financier.
As The World Turns, I remain still,
Mona Lisa’s resting bitch face
blunted only by my silky curtain of hair.
Throw it all in the cauldron, I don’t care.
People keep mistaking me for a doll
when in fact I am a cyborg,
surrounded by The Young & Restless
snorting coke and drinking corpse revivers
in the General Hospital—downward,
I mean backward, glance of Orpheus
softening my every blow.
My fantasy for this script is simple:
I just want to edit out the boring parts,
the parts where I forgot to scream.
Guiding Light is my real life:
the world around me is the dream.

 

______________________

 

Meridian

I’ve been in this body so long.
My ace in the hole body, my one
bird in two hands body, my rut.
What does it mean to understand?
I count the syllables on my hand. I don
my leisure suit and stroll the boardwalk.
O bituminous coal. O indiscriminate
hulk. My Ikea bookshelf body
is bookended by equine statuettes.
The world is full of tall strangers
and I haven’t seen a face
that loves me for days.
O moon, you are a hangnail.
O moon, your hair’s a fright.
Note bene, this product has been
enlarged to show texture.
The cure’s a subtle realignment
between one’s inner monster
and the line of longitude that scores
the earth. I thought beauty would
save me. No, I really thought
beauty would save me.
I’ve been in this body so long;
I’ve forgotten how to flee.
Objects in the mirror may
be closer than they appear:
they too ache with unknown
want, dumb weight of destiny.

 

_______________

 

Epistemology

The bleeding title has bled like the idea of triumph,
white flag manifesting on the top of a summit or heap,
and the church bells sounding from the home’s interior
are in fact part of a discontinued sitcom, blaring from the TV.
Doubt takes over. What if there is no outside, no other side?
Dread takes over. How can the subject cross the divide?
Descartes curls up into the safety of his stove, while you
tightrope walk the abyss, or go through contortions
to deny it is there. Any way you twist it, the moon is a cop
and you can’t afford a vowel so as to spell it out, carefully:
with all certainty, nothing. Any purported solution
is smoke and mirrors. I am the planet Pluto in a play.
I mime the grief economy. The death economy.
The libidinal economy. There are so many kinds
of poverty, and the body is a kind of forgetting.
There is no magical leap across the chasm.
There is no way to make it disappear, either,
with a flourish of the metaphysical wand.
The sun, in this equation, is a ticking bomb,
and the lawn is a field where a field once was.
My desire is to be your shape, your data, your
blind spot, your moan. Ashes to ashes, art to art,
object to object. Now let us pray. Now let us
differentiate between the knower and the known.

Poet Spotlight: Karenne Wood [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

 

In anticipation of Tupelo Press’s forthcoming anthology project, Native Voices, I’m pleased to continue a series of posts honoring Indigenous poetry from North America.

But first, I’d like to say a few words about this exciting and necessary anthology. Tupelo Press is eager to celebrate a more complete version of the story we tell—about ourselves, our past, and what is possible in language. In this book, the first of its kind, every poet will present new poems, as well as an original essay, and a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists. Our anthology is intended to embody the dynamic and ongoing conversations that take place in Indigenous poetry through writerly craft across generational, geographic, and stylistic divides.

With that in mind, it is an honor and a delight to introduce one of our poets, Karenne Wood.  Karenne Wood is an enrolled member of the Monacan Indian Nation who directs Virginia Indian Programs at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. She holds a MFA in poetry and a PhD in linguistic anthropology. She has worked at the National Museum of the American Indian as a researcher and at the Association on American Indian Affairs as a repatriation specialist. In 2015 she was honored as one of Virginia’s Women in History. Karenne is the author of two poetry collections, Markings on Earth (2000) and Weaving the Boundary, (2016). Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Kenyon Review, Orion, and Shenandoah.  

Here is one of her contributions to the anthology project, "Deer Woman."  Enjoy!  

 

 

Deer Woman

He hunted me into the clouds as I sought the blue
star-petaled flower, its scent like magnolia and peach.
I left my family in the meadow to pick my steps
Across patched snow, where fields grasped edges of sky.

There is within some of us a longing to be stripped clean.

Alongside, the forest held his shape. His scent rose to me
with the wind. Too late I knew him, too late to find cover,
and I ran as I was made to—haunches taut, nostrils steaming,
like a swallow I darted into glistening whiteness.

When I tired, he was there. His circle tightened.
Dark, and dark-eyed, hypnotic—I could feel his hunger
as my own. I had taunted his dreams more than once,
dreamt that mouth, the merciless craving in him.

There is within some of us a longing to be stripped clean,

To give it all—strings of sinew, tufted hair, marrow,
white ropes of fat, to bare the body’s pulse. I froze,
heavy with the need to dissolve into him, his mouth
the deep red song of an appeasable desire.

On the wind, I hear another song, my family calling out
to me, calling me into my name. But I cannot return
from this altitude, bound to his hunger, which is a kind
of love. I will kneel in a cloud’s wisp of grace, to discover

how completely our own wanting wounds us.

 

Published in Weaving the Boundary, University of Arizona Press.   Grateful acknowledgements as well to Shenandoah, where this poem first appeared. 

 

For more information about our anthology project, and how you can help bring this book to life, please visit our Kickstarter page.   

The Year in Review: Easter, and the Christians are at it again, raising the dead. By Jill Alexander Essbaum (April 6, 2012)

  

If you see me in church this weekend, I’ll be crying.

Wait.  Scratch that. 

I’ll be weeping.

Hmm.  No.  That’s not right either.

Try:  Sobbing.  Bawling.  Engaging in a back-pew sort of break-down best reserved for funerals (and only really, really, really tragic ones at that). 

I know.  It totally doesn’t make sense.  In the fairy tale of Holy Week, Easter’s the happy ending.  It’s the Resurrection!  It’s death undone!  It’s every promise rendered right!  It’s bunnies and chocolate!  Jesus, Jill. Jill—it’s Jesus!   

AND YET: The minute that stone is rolled away I lose my shit.  Crude, but there’s no other way to put it.

Easter fucks me up.*

A digression, not particularly brief. Indulge, please:

Indomitable faith isn’t my strong suit.  I’m pretty good at misgiving; doubt’s my specialty.  Trust? A habit I’ve unlearned.  My conviction is never convinced and what assurance I do have is never, but never blessèd.  Therefore my belief in God comes and goes in the manner of a city train: it chugs from Skepticism as if it were a northern suburb and it runs all the way down to Denial, an outlying town at the end of the line.  And while I do indeed disembark at Spirituality Central Station often enough to know which tram will get me to the cathedral without having to look it up in a Frommer’s, at some point I get back on the train.  It’s inevitable.  To do otherwise would to not be Jill.  This is part of the problem. 

But even in doubt, I have always prayed.  I pray, in fact, in the manner that Sugar advises us to write which is like a motherfucker.  I pray like Shaft prays.  Eat your heart out, Roundtree.  Can you dig it?  I pray aloud.  I pray loudly.  I pray all day long, though my self-appointed hour is five am.  I take a pre-dawn walk and speak to the sky.  God’s come to expect me at that time.

(Lest you find me too virtuous for my vestments, I ought to confess it took months for me to train myself to pray for other people beyond ‘andgodpleaseblesssoandsoamen.’  Mostly when I pray I’m thrice a singer’s third syllable solfège: Mi, mi, mi.  Not so proud, not so pious.)

But I pray.  Boldly.  Like how Luther says to sin.  I’m not very nice about it.  I’m adamant.  My most-prayed prayer? What Jacob told the angel. I will not let you go until you bless me.  To which I add: And then, I still won’t let you go.  To which I also add: Dammit.

And so I doubt.  And so I pray.  I’m ok with that.  I don’t think it’s so unusual.  I’m not the only one of us who walks and chews gum at the same time.  This is a tension I’ve held for years.  Tension, you know, is sometimes called for.  A guy-wire must be taut to be of any stabilizing use.  And what this tensity has taught me is that slackening isn’t always safe.  I’m tempted to retell the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, but I won’t.  Except to say: Bridegroom awaits.  Better watch out, not cry, not pout.  Here come da judge.  Here come da judge.

It’s not the doubt, then, that ramrods me at Easter exactly.

It’s Easter’s premise.

You wanna get to Heaven?  Baby, you gots to die.

I don't believe in death. In the manner of a home owner association president who doesn’t support retail zoning.  “I don’t believe in having a Stop-n-Go so close to our school!  The children will buy Red Bull and Slim Jims and ruin their suppers!” she might say.  Likewise, me.  I don’t believe in death anywhere at all.  I don’t sustain it, I didn’t vote for it, I didn’t second the motion, canvas the neighborhood, or circulate a petition.  No one should ever have to die is I what I think.  I reserve the right to think.  I feel this deeply, more profoundly than I will ever be able to articulate.  Slim Jims, Red Bulls, Slurpees and scratch-off lotto tickets my ass.  Take your caskets and your headstones and your lilies and that weird green Astroturf stuff they roll out over by the gravesite so the folding chairs won’t wobble so much and shove those into the subdivision’s clubhouse.  I’m going swimming.

But on the third day, according to the scriptures, He rose again. 

Hmm.

Let’s think about that. 

Nevermind the water, the wine, the walking on the sea, the stilling of the tempest, the healings, the feeding of the thousands from what amounted to a few grocery bags of Lunchables—THIS is the miracle.  THIS is the big show.  THIS is the magic a-happenin’.  We’re in David Blaine territory now.  It’s only been Doug Henning to this point.   

Several months ago (and I will keep this brief) I was seized with a particular terror that was manifesting (sorry, is manifesting) as atheism.  The panic is physical—physics, actually and entirely—and not existential, and it constellates around infinity and the tangible something that nothing is (like, when you take everything away—what’s that?).  I’m not the only poet who has wondered where time goes when it’s over or if God is God, then who made Him?   This isn’t unique to me.  But it’s the center point in a very menacing wheel of ache in perpetual spin.  And so I think often (too often) about these horrors.  If I ever go truly mad, it will be from pondering this.  I promise you.

Because I don’t get it. 

Therefore when Jesus jumps out of his Hobbit hole and yells ‘Surprise!’ all I can do is make like a wail and blubber.

Because I don’t get that, either.

And you kind of need to be on board (at least a little bit) with the whole resurrection scenario in order to be a Christian. 

I want an answer.  I always want an answer.  Not a figurative answer.  A literal one.  A flesh and bone answer.  A wrap my arms around it answer.  I want my parents back.  My dead friends.  Other family I’ve lost.  The people I’ve yet to lose. 

Where did you go, Jesus, I'm dying (ha!) to ask.  How did you return?  Did it hurt getting stuffed back into your body?  Do you remember what happened in between those two events?  Where is everyone else?  Do they want to come back?  Where you gonna put everyone?  What happens if someone’s body got burned?  Whose do they get?  Why do you have to die to live forever? 

Yup, I will cry in church.  I will weep for fear and the fact of all my failures.  What I have done and what, as the order of confession reads, I have left undone (which is much and much). I will cry because when someone says The Lord is risen I will reply He is risen…perhaps?, and that’s not the answer you’re supposed to give.  I cry over orphans and widows.  How it’s indulgent to be so vexed when there are those in the world with traumas more dire than this.  I’ll cry because I wasn’t there when Jesus came back but Thomas was and even he doubted. That ain’t right.  Because I’m 40, and everything I should know better than, I don’t.  Because the only thing that comforts me is God.  But we’ve reached an impasse, us.  Because I feel safer in the dark than I do in the light and there’s something very wrong with that.  I’ll cry because when Mary gets to the tomb she mistakes the risen Christ for the gardener, a detail that’s always bothered me—is Jesus pulling a fast one?  That's not nice.  I’ll cry because I’m noisy and slobbish and hypersexed and a hypochondriac.  Because grey areas are lost on me.  I’ll cry because I’m worried that my Easter dress makes my ass look fat and then I’ll cry because I am a vain, vain woman. Because I’m tired.  And I always bite off more than I can chew.  Because I want you to like me.  I want God to like me.  Because I want God to be.  That’s my new most often supplication: Be there.  As if the absence of God has ears.  Because fuck this shit about Christ giving us our bodies back—don’t take them from us in the first place.  I’ll weep because Easter Vigil is a beautiful service and I carry my emotions just under the skin. Because I hide nothing.  Because I can’t.  I’ll cry for the impossible mechanics of a resurrection and the terrible physics of infinity.

And the dead.  I'll cry for the dead.  The dead.  The dead.  The goddamned dead.  Or is it the godblessed dead?  Which is it, Lord? Tell me.  You tell me now which it is.  I will not let you go until you tell me which it is.

And even then…

Dammit. 

* I actually gave up the f-word (saying it) for Lent.  Or, tried to.  I've found, however, that as Easter nears and I get more tweaked about this stuff... well, I get more tweaked.  There's no other way to put it.  Easter fucks me up.  

The Year in Review: "Famous Blue Raincoat" by Lawrence Epstein (May 24, 2012)

Were the haunting, breathtaking, painful lyrics of “Famous Blue Raincoat” written by almost any other songwriter besides Leonard Cohen, there would be no question about the song’s meaning.  It appears to a straightforward confessional letter about a love triangle between “L. Cohen” his woman “Jane” and their mutual friend, a man with a blue raincoat who has gone to the desert and at one time had a brief affair with Jane.

As such, the song is deeply, almost embarrassingly, personal, an epistolary song about a wounded man who cannot help forgiving the friend.

The overpowering emotion of the song inhibits another look at the lyrics, but Cohen’s autobiography immediately suggests problems with this common interpretation.  Specifically, it is Cohen’s life that is being described both as the narrator and the other man.

It is the friend in the song not “L. Cohen,” the narrator, who has a “famous blue raincoat.” But as the real Cohen noted in liner notes to the 1975 collection The Best of Leonard Cohen, the blue raincoat was his. “I had a good raincoat then, a Burberry I got in London in 1959….It hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather.”

In the song, the narrator asks the friend, “Did you ever go clear?” This is a reference to Scientology and its state of “Clear.” Cohen himself for a brief time at least was a Church of Scientology member.

In the song, “L. Cohen” sings to the friend:

“You'd been to the station to meet every train
And you came home without Lili Marlene “

But in his concert introduction to Chelsea Hotel #2, Cohen said, “Once upon a time, there was a hotel in New York City. There was an elevator in that hotel. One evening, about three in the morning, I met a young woman in that hotel… I wasn’t looking for her., I was looking for Lili Marlene.” The song “Lili Marlene” (there are variants in the spelling of her name) was a popular love song from World War II although it had been written in Germany in 1915 during the First World War. The song is about a soldier who stands waiting by a lamppost for his love, Lili Marlene. That is, Lili is a symbol of perfect love that has gone away.

But if it is Leonard Cohen who has experienced all that is attributed to the friend, then to whom is “L. Cohen” singing? To ask the question is to answer it. “L. Cohen” is one part of Leonard Cohen singing to another part of Leonard Cohen. Call that other part, the friend in the song, “Leonard Cohen.” “L. Cohen” is faithful to women. “Leonard Cohen” is not. Leonard Cohen, the real songwriter, is writing about a romantic triangle, but he is both men in that triangle. “Jane” is any woman Leonard Cohen has been involved with.

Using this premise, it is possible to work through the song.

It opens with this line: “It's four in the morning, the end of December.” Clearly, given the time of day and year, the setting is cold and dark. It is a line reminiscent of Robert Frost’s famous line in “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” an evening the speaker calls

“the darkest evening of the year.” In both cases, the setting represents the speaker’s profound sense of loneliness, of sorrow, of a depression like no other. In this despair “L. Cohen” writes to himself, seeking understanding perhaps even a reconciliation.

And so, in a step toward that reconciliation, “L. Cohen” sings: “I'm writing you now just to see if you're better.” “L. Cohen” wants the two sides to be friends.

“New York is cold, but I like where I'm living
There's music on Clinton Street all through the evening.”

Clinton Street is on the Lower East Side in New York. Leonard Cohen really lived there. Clinton Street is named after the Revolutionary War hero General George Clinton who went on to become the first Governor of New York after independence and, in 1804, the Vice-President of the United States. The area, that is, is drenched in both Jewish and American history and has its own ongoing soundtrack. Unlike “Leonard Cohen,” “L. Cohen seems content, pleased about where he is in life.”

“I hear that you're building your little house deep in the desert.”

“Leonard Cohen” is not like “L. Cohen.” He is emotionally apart from other people, far away from them in his mind. A desert is so dry that it can support only very sparse vegetation if any at all. The desert is a perfect metaphor for “Leonard Cohen’s” mind: it is so dry no fertile ideas can grow there. The desert also has multiple religious meanings. In Judaism the Israelites escaping slavery in Egypt stayed in the desert wandering for forty years, but they also received the Torah at Mount Sinai and did eventually get to the land of Israel. In Christianity, Jesus was tempted by the Devil in the Judean desert. The desert is a place of testing and “Leonard Cohen” was just in such a place in his mind.

”You're living for nothing now, I hope you're keeping some kind of record.”

This line, of course, has a double meaning. “Living for nothing” can mean living without cost, but it more likely especially means living without a purpose, desperately searching. “L. Cohen,” ever the optimist wants “Leonard Cohen” to mine the despair for material, to keep a record.  

“Yes, and Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear
Did you ever go clear?”

“Jane” is the woman in both their lives. The romantic “Leonard” has given her a memento to remember him by as he left to go on a spiritual exploration.

 “Ah, the last time we saw you you looked so much older
Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder.”

“Leonard’s” depression is aging him. The blue raincoat is a central symbol in the poem. A raincoat is a protection against wet weather, against the storms of life. “Leonard’s” raincoat was famous, because it had always protected him. He was lucky, blessed by life. All had gone well for him as he walked through life. Others got drenched, but he had his coat, his ability to conjure up the right language in the right order and put that language to music. Now, though, the raincoat is torn. It is no longer working as it once did. “Leonard” is getting a bit wet because the raincoat has torn.

 “You'd been to the station to meet every train
And you came home without Lili Marlene.”

Poor “Leonard” has been looking for the perfect woman, but he cannot meet her.  

”And you treated my woman to a flake of your life
And when she came back she was nobody's wife.”

 “Leonard,” the great romantic has bothered to give a discarded piece of himself, a flake, to Jane, but, given that it was “Leonard,” they broke up and she returned to the faithful “L. Cohen” but she had been permanently changed. She had discovered that she wasn’t anyone’s attachment. She wasn’t defined just by her relationship to a man.

“Well I see you there with the rose in your teeth
One more thin gypsy thief.”

“L. Cohen is angry in these lines, mocking “Leonard’s” romantic pose, his Gypsy-like nomadic attitude, but in his case being a nomad meant traveling not from place to place but from woman to woman. “L. Cohen” believes in devotion to one woman for life. “Leonard” does not seem capable of that.

The end of the song is the attempt at reconciliation. “L. Cohen” misses his “brother” despite the fact that this double has killed part of him. “L. Cohen” will not put up a fight if “Leonard” returns.

And so the two sides of Leonard Cohen, the responsible side who gives voice to the song, and the depressed romantic side that is scolded and reprimanded, reach a truce. The songwriter has come, for the moment, to accept a self he’s not entirely comfortable with but recognizes as irreversible.  

As if Cohen’s lyrical achievement weren’t enough in this song, there is a technical poetic point that should be mentioned. A good deal of the song is written in amphibrachs. An amphibrach consists of a stressed syllable which has an unstressed syllable on either side of it. Consider, for example, these two lines. I have underlined the stressed syllables:

It’s four in the morning, the end of December.

I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better.

What better way to write a poem about a love triangle than to have a syllabic triangle with a stressed syllable surrounded by two unstressed syllables.

I’m aware of the 1994 BBC interview in which Cohen expressed ambiguity about the nature of the song, and it’s certainly open to a wide variety of interpretations. That’s what makes Leonard Cohen so mysterious and worthwhile.

The Year in Review: Goodbye WS; Hello to you in this dark evening season by Jennifer Michael Hecht (February 18, 2012)

Dear Bleaders,

I’m sure lots of people reading this blog know we lost a staggeringly great poet, Wisława Szymborska, a few weeks ago. It was Feb 1; she was 88. I can’t help giving us this one of her poems right now.

Museum

Here are plates with no appetite.
And wedding rings, but the requited love
has been gone now for some three hundred years.

Here’s a fan–where is the maiden’s blush?
Here are swords–where is the ire?
Nor will the lute sound at the twilight hour.

Since eternity was out of stock,
ten thousand aging things have been amassed instead.
The moss-grown guard in golden slumber
props his mustache on Exhibit Number…

Eight. Metals, clay and feathers celebrate
their silent triumphs over dates.
Only some Egyptian flapper’s silly hairpin giggles.

The crown has outlasted the head.
The hand has lost out to the glove.
The right shoe has defeated the foot.

As for me, I am still alive, you see.
The battle with my dress still rages on.
It struggles, foolish thing, so stubbornly!
Determined to keep living when I’m gone!

Well at 88 she outlasted a lot of dresses. Still, it sucks. No more of those poems.  I had always hoped to meet her. One thing I always Iove about her, evident here, is how much it pissed her off that the world didn't hold meaning in a visible way: how battlegrounds for instance went back to parks, a shudder shared by many but also more subtle situations too, like how you might have been at a railway station one day, even though you weren't, and how odd that it happened anyway, the meetings, the thefts, even without you. "A suitcase disappeared, not mine."

As for me friends, life continues to present itself as a war, a hot war against bleak feelings. Is this feeling thing that is me a biological thing or a thing amid the world with a usage quite askew? I may now know a thing or two about the answers to my offset typesetting, but I also have to dine on a good deal of doubt. What I can see is that life requires a dire pressing forward without leaving a sufficiently convincing trail of flower petals to find one's way back to the beginning.

Instead it's all beginning and all middle, all the time, and you just have to keep rowing even when the scenery changes on one side and stays precisely the same on the other, and other magic tricks of reality. Maybe that's a kind of growing, you're on a riverboat and after some point the inner coast of the river is always the same few houses and yards, while the outer coast starts blurring by peopled with odd beings carrying small electronics. You don't age like leaves falling onto a pile of snow, you age like snow melting off a pile of leaves, you arrive rising up from underneath. 

It's the dark side of the year my bleaders, mid february and dark and rainy with a little spritz of spring here and there. As is my habit, I'm speaking now to those of you fighting the darkness like a war, at all costs, this is the season to fight this thing, the darkness of life, life's rotten disjointment. I'm a believer in stories and stories get into your fiber about what you should be doing and how much it takes to feel alright, and I'm a believer in changing your fiber to fit a better story. It just takes a lot longer than your average hot war. It takes gallons of therapy, of one sort or another. And these gallons are gallions and this war is a land air and water war, and we have to fight for a story that makes it alright. We have to fight our own fiber.

Get some Szymborska, let her rock you from the beyond. Plus, you know, keep up the fight with your dress! Seriously. We need you. I need you, on my side. Don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

Love,

Jennifer

Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of two books of poetry Funny (University of Wisconsin, 2005) and The Next Ancient World (Tupeloe Press, 2001). Her non-fiction books are Doubt: A History (HarperOne, 2004) and The Happiness Myth (HarperOne, 2007).She earned her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Columbia University. Her poems have been included in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1999 and 2006.  She teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at The New School and is a fellow of The New York Institute for the Humanities. Read more about Jennifer Michael Hecht here. Follow her blog, Dear Fonzie, here. Read her BAP blog posts here.

The Year in Review: The Dogs are Howling, Allen by Laura Orem (February 14, 2012)

An Italian greyhound being "stacked" prior to a going-over by the judge.

The 136rd Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is going on right now at Madison Square Garden. Purebred dogs of all shapes and sizes compete to be judged "Best in Show" and have their names engraved on the big trophy. It may seem confusing - how do you compare a chihuahua and a Great Dane? - but the dogs aren't really judged against each other. They are measured by their breed standard, compiled by the breed's parent club, which describes the ideal specimen of that dog.   The closer a particular dog gets to perfection, the higher the chance of being chosen "Best in Show."  But there are also those indefinable characteristics of personality and sparkle, that make the judging so exciting. It isn't always about the numbers.

 

2011 Best in Show Winner: Scottish Deerhound Grand Champion Foxcliffe Hickory Wind. (Hickory to you and me.)

The annual WKC show also introduces new breeds to the American audience. Of course, most of these breeds aren't "new" at all; in fact, many have been around for thousands of years, but they may be unfamiliar here. To be a recognized breed in the US, the parent breed club must make an application to the American Kennel Club, proving a sustainable US population with responsible breeding practices. There are six new breeds this year: the American English Coonhound, the Cesky Terrier, the Entelbucher Mountain Dog, the Finnish Lapphund, the Norwegian Lundehund, and - take a deep breath before attempting to pronounce this one - the Xoloitzcuintli (left). The "Show-Lo," as its called for short, can be traced back to the ancient Aztecs and is the national dog of Mexico. You may know it as the "Mexican hairless." 

All dogs begin in their breed competition. The winners of each breed go on to their group competition. Groups are made up of breeds with similar purposes or jobs. The AKC recognizes seven: the Terriers (self-explanatory), the Herding Group (German shepherds, border collies, corgis, etc.), the Working Group (mastiffs, Rottweilers, etc.), the Hounds (everything from dachshunds to Irish wolfhounds); the Sporting Group (setters, spaniels, and retrievers); the Toy Group (little guys bred solely for companionship); and the Non-Sporting Group (everyone else who doesn't fit into any of the other groups). The winners of each group go on to the Best in Show competition; the winner here is literally the top dog.

 

Toy poodles being judged in their breed competition.

 

One of the fun parts of watching the WKC show is hearing the dogs' registry names. Like the names of racehorses, these names reflect the ancestry of a particular dog. At Westminster, they are proceeded by the word "Champion;" to be a Champion, a dog must have earned at least 15 points (depending on placement) at AKC sanctioned dog shows. Only dogs with this distinction can be entered at the WKC show.  But all of these dogs are also family pets. It's kind of impossible to holler, "Come back here, Champion Oreo Cookie of Royal Nabisco," so of course, all the dogs have "call names." Sometimes they are diminuitives of their registry names (like Cookie or Biscuit for above); sometimes not (like Sport or Butch). For example, growing up I had a registered German shepherd. His registry name was "Conrad Von Dornberg." We called him Atlas.

The registry names can be pretty pretentious. With this in mind, Slate has posted a little quiz. Can you identify which of these is the real name of a WKC group winner and which is a real line from Allen Ginsberg's Howl? I got 15 out of 15 (I teach Howl regularly, so I had an advantage). No cheating - and let me know how you did. Make your puppy proud.

Ginsberg or Canine?

Tune into the USA channel tonight at 8pm to watch the last three group competitions and root for Best in Show.

The Year in Review: The Bookstore by Michael Schiavo (November 12, 2012)

11 Housatonic Street, Lenox, MA

I’ve worked at The Bookstore in Lenox, Massachusetts since at least last Wednesday.

If you get that joke, then you’ve probably been to The Bookstore where you’ve probably met owner Matthew Tannenbaum. Matt’s been in the book business for a little while now. He recounts the beginning of his career as a bookman in the chapbook-sized My Years at the Gotham Book Mart with Frances Steloff, Proprietor (on sale during business hours; come on in). He’s working on a longer memoir, so I won’t, nor for reasons of plausible deniability do I particularly want to, divulge the details—which are wild, heartbreaking, historic—suffice it to say that The Bookstore came into his care during the nation’s bicentennial year and, despite claims to the contrary, he’s been serving the people of Lenox and the greater community ever since.

The Bookstore is a New England City Lights: a thriving counterculture symbol not simply because of Matt’s connection to banned-book champion Steloff nor solely because of his own place in that continuum (e.g. the poster trumpeting Matt’s reading of Kerouac’s Dr. Sax with Michael Gizzi and Clark Coolidge, the photo of him shaking hands with Vaclav Havel) but precisely because it’s a shop stocked by a man who knows that reading a book, whether the pulpiest mass market, the most surreal love poetry, or the humblest picture book, can reveal in any person of any age limitless reservoirs of imagination, of wonder, of hope. In the E-Age, selling print books is about as countercultural an activity as you can engage in in these United States.

That’s one of the reasons, but not the only, that puts me in my car 2 ½ hours ’round-trip three days a week. On one of those three days, I usually get a compliment on the store’s selection, which has been cultivated by Matt through nearly four decades of his own literary love affairs—but is also the result of a bookman having a deep and ongoing conversation with his community. Because he loves to hear what people love to read, whether they’re old friends or new acquaintances, they in turn allow Matt to suggest books they might not otherwise consider, enlarging their own point of view. It’s buoying to observe and it happens all the time.

If you’ve read Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, you might have seen Matt’s name before. This contemporary epic of motherhood and community was written on December 22, 1978 at 100 Main Street in Lenox, down the street and around the corner from The Bookstore. Almost everything in Lenox is down the street and around the corner. Matt appears a couple of times, but the most notable occurs near the end of Part III, on page 53 of the latest New Directions paperback (NDP876). On the preceding page, standing in the health food store, the question comes: “You think something like a book will change the world, don’t you?” The answer, in the next line: “I do, I take pleasure in taking the milk with the most cream”. A few lines later brings us to this wonderful decision:

 

Let’s go in to the bookstore to see Matthew Tannenbaum

The dream figure of the boy-father-mother who turns into

The recalcitrant bookseller as we do

                                                     I look over the shoulder

Of a girl flipping through the pages of a book of women’s faces

All beauties, bigger than life, black and white

                                                                  Scavullo on Beauty

You study poetry and read magazines upstairs

                                                                     Let me tell you

The titles of all the current books:

                                                 The Suicide Cult, The Ends of Power,

The Origin of the Brunists, Invasion of the Body Snatchers,

War and Remembrance, The Winds of War, The Dogs of War, Dog Soldiers,

Mommie Dearest, My Moby Dick, My Mother Myself, By Myself, Uncle,

Mortal Friends, Nappy Edges, Tender Miracles,

Song of Solomon, Delta of Venus, The Women’s Room,

Ladies Man, Six Men, The Water-Method Man, Watership Down,

The Night People, Shepherds of the Night, A Dream Journey,

Daniel Martin, Delmore Schwartz, Edith Wharton,

Time and Again, Better Times Than These, Centennial,

The Professor of Desire, The Honorable Schoolboy,

Heart Beat, The Third Mind, Jack’s Book,

Beasts, The Magus, The Flounder, The Fabricator,

Words of Advice, Secrets and Surprises, Dispatches,

Prelude to Terror, Full Disclosure, Final Payments,

The World of Damon Runyon, The Stories of John Cheever,

Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe, Praxis,

The Annotated Shakespeare, The Last Best Hope

And Chesapeake

 

There are lots of beautiful things about this passage. There is no more “upstairs”—it’s now a slightly elevated section of the store with our children’s books. We don’t sell magazines; you can find a selection at Loeb’s Food Town next door, as well as newspapers. You can, however, still come and study poetry, as we’ve got an entire wall of it in the adjacent Get Lit Wine Bar, where I bartend on Friday nights, sometimes Thursday mornings.

Owner Matthew Tannenbaum behind the bar at Get Lit

It’s also a delightful snapshot of the publishing world in the late 1970s. One title in particular stands out: My Moby Dick by William Humphrey, a romp about a colossal trout and the fanatical angler out to hook him. It’s out of print, and we recently tracked down a used copy for someone. The Lenox connection is significant: Melville wrote Moby-Dick not but a few miles from The Bookstore at Arrowhead, on the Lenox-Pittsfield line. I pass by it every day on the way to work.

In my own decade-long career as a bookman, I’ve worked at various Borders and Barnes & Noble locations. I was the textbook manager at the Yale Bookstore. For a number of years, I was a manager at another great independent, the Northshire Bookstore, in Manchester Center, Vermont. I’ve worked for and with great people who have enriched my literary vocabulary, often in ways I never would’ve predicted. I’ve also worked for and with people who, in the end of the day, could’ve been selling hemorrhoid cream for all they cared, so long as you bought something from them.

The Bookstore is different.

Every once in a while, I’ll get a customer who, rather wistfully, goes on about how great it would be to own a bookstore. I try not to disabuse them. Those reveries of lounging around, talking literature the live-long are quickly erased when you have to deal with the day-to-day operations of unpacking, stocking, ordering, organizing the store. It never ends. But since we’re working with books, it’s a joy, and occasionally, moreso than any other bookstore I’ve worked at, we do get a chance to kick back and talk. About books, yes, but also about life. That is, after all, where the books comes from. It helps when Bookstore friends like Alice Brock, Bill Corbett, Harry Mathews, or Geoff Young stop in to say hello.

Anyone drawn to this blog is probably aware that the publishing industry is in—O clichéd phrase—a state of flux. We talk about this from time to time at The Bookstore. The conclusion we always come to is to keep doing what we’re doing, which is: to stock the best books, new and old, by the best writers from a variety of eras and styles and let great readers come find us. And they do. Every day.

Anyway, it’s too late to stop now. We don’t have every book ever printed available in the store for you to purchase. No one does, not even Amazon. But we do have a lot of great books, and there’s a good chance a few of those great books you’ve never heard of. So, like I said, come on in. I think of The Bookstore as like Ruthie in her honky-tonk lagoon.

We may not always have what you need, but we definitely have what you want.

* We always have lots of readings at The Bookstore, but one that Best American Poetry readers might be interested in is Peter Gizzi and Bernadette Mayer, Thursday, December 20, 2012 at 7:00 p.m.

  Michael Schiavo is the author of The Mad Song and the chapbooks 275 Ocean Avenue, Beautiful School, Dandelion (from his Gondola imprint), Ranges I (H_NGM_N) and Ranges II (Forklift). He founded the Long River Review at the University of Connecticut in 1997 and would later create the Ordinary Evening Reading Series in New Haven. His poetry has appeared in such diverse publications as The Yale Review, The Normal School, Fourteen Hills, No Tell Motel, La Petite Zine, The Awl, Sawmill, Country Music, Jerry, Drunken Boat, jubilat, Verse Daily, the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology and is forthcoming from Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets (Wipf & Stock) edited by Luke Hankins. He's the founding editor of The Equalizer, an occasional poetry anthology, as well as Gondola, a print 'zine that features early poems from Paul Violi in Issue 1 and new work from Ray DeJesús, Buck Downs, Matt Hart, Curtis Jensen, Catherine Meng, and Sandra Simonds in Issue 2. He has recently completed translations of Virgil's Eclogues and the Dao De Jing, in addition to dub versions of Shakespeare's Sonnets. He lives in Vermont where he sometimes updates his blog, The Unruly Servant, and tweets at @Michael_Schiavo.

The Year in Review: Word To World by Sholeh Wolpé (November 5, 2012)

My mother and her sisters were born in Ishqabad, “the city of love,” in Turkmenistan. She was educated in Cypress as a nurse, speaking both Turkish and Greek. She then went to Tehran, met my father and married him. This is how I came to be born in Iran. And what a country! A place where in every home you almost always find a copy of poems of the revered Iranian poet, Hafez; a country where even the illiterate can recite a line or two from the poems of Rumi, Hafez, Saʿdī or any other classic poet to make his or her point in a conversation. It’s a country where an amusing children’s game—and I played this as a twelve-year-old with much gusto—is moshaereh, a game of poetry and memory where using poems learned by heart, one child recites a line of a poem, and the other child using the last letter of the poem must recite another poem that begins with that letter. For example:

 Child one:  A seasoned traveler on the road to love’s door

                    Your blood leaves its mark on every step  [i] 

                                                                            (H..E. Sayeh)

 Child two:  Prophets of words! You pen-wielding idols.

                    If your message was the Truth, why did it crash

                    like waves at the shores of degradation?  [ii]

                                                                              (Nader Naderpour)

    Child one:  Not for the sake of forests or for the sea

                     but for a leaf, for a drop brighter than your eyes.  [iii]

                                                                               (Ahmad Shamlou)

  … and so on.  There was so much poetry stored in our little heads that we sometimes kept the game going for as long as a half hour. 

 For Iranians, as for people living in many parts of the world, poets occupy a lofty position and to them poetry is like bread, air, and colors. It is in this way that poets wield power, and at the same time set trembling the hearts of politicians, dictators, and even religious leaders. Indeed from Damascus, to Beijing to Tehran in every revolution or uprising, poets are among the first to be jailed. But the voice of the poet cannot be arrested, and that makes them dangerous to oppressive regimes such as Iran and China.

 As an Iranian-American poet, I have always been a great advocate of literature in translation. As a poet who writes in English and saddles two languages and cultures, I have made it my duty to spend a portion of my time translating the poetry of Iranian poets. Not having access to the literature of a culture, movies like Argo and Not Without My Daughter, and news reports from sources such as Fox network bring to focus a whole nation through a single, and sometimes distorted, lens. I consider this kind of one-sided distorted presentation of any story dangerous, unfair, and in opposition to the peaceful direction towards which most human beings in this world wish to move.

 In a country like Iran, a great number of laws are passed just so that injustice can be carried out legally. In many cases poets bearing witness to injustices and atrocities are guardians against lies and half-truths perpetrated by the lawmakers and fanatic religious leaders. These poets are harassed, jailed, or forced to flee. It is imperative that their poems are translated into other languages, and that it is done so in a caring manner:  as living poems translated by poets who are fluent in both languages and cultures.  Carolyn Forché in her groundbreaking anthology Against Forgetting writes, “One of the things that I believe happens when poets bear witness to historical events is that everyone they tell also becomes responsible for what they have heard and what they now know.”[iv]  In my opinion, taking on this responsibility is crucial to our progress towards a harmonious and tolerant world society because to know the poetry of a nation means a closer look at its soul. Kenyan novelist and essayist, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, who has always urged dialogue between nations through culture writes:

 Culture is a product of a people’s history. But it also reflects that history and embodies a whole set of values by which a people view themselves and their place in time and space. Cultural contact can therefore play a great part in bringing about mutual understanding between peoples of different nations. Instead of armaments and nuclear weapons, instead of imposing one’s own version of democracy on tiny islands and continents through Rapid or Low Deployment Forces, let people of the world dialogue together through culture.[v]

 Presently, only 3 to 5 percent of books published in the U.S. are translations. Yet, literature in translation is a tool necessary in building bridges that connect people of different cultures and religious persuasions.  When there is a bridge, there will be foot traffic; and when we cross and engage with other cultures, through poetry, novels, and plays, we are that much closer to understanding them. That, I believe as a poet and a woman, is a good solid stride towards peace.

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[i] Art of Stepping Through Time, by H.E. Sayeh, translated by Mojdeh Marashi and Chad Sweeney. From The Forbidden: Poems From Iran and Its Exiles, edited by Sholeh Wolpé, Michigan State University Press, 2012.

[ii] A Homily on Leaving by Nader Naderpour, translated by Sholeh Wolpé and Sahba Shayani. From The Forbidden: Poems From Iran and Its Exiles, edited by Sholeh Wolpé, Michigan State University Press, 2012.

[iii] In This Dead-End Road by Ahmad Shamlou, translated by Sholeh Wolpé. From The Forbidden: Poems From Iran and Its Exiles, edited by Sholeh Wolpé, Michigan State University Press, 2012.

[iv] Against Forgetting, edited by Carolyn Forché, W.W. Norton & Company 1993.

[v]  Moving the Center: The Struggle For Cultural Freedoms, by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o; Heinmann Portsmouth, NH; EAEP, Nairobi; and James Curry Oxford, 1993.

Sholeh Wolpé was born in Tehran, Iran, and has lived in Trinidad, the UK, and the United States.  Her publications include Keeping Time With Blue Hyacinths (University of Arkansas Press, 2013), Rooftops of Tehran (Red Hen, 2008), The Scar Saloon (2004), and Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (2007) which awarded the 2010 Lois Roth Translation Prize. Find a complete list of titles here. Wolpé is the editor of The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and its exiles (Michigan State University Press, 2012), Breaking the Jaws of Silence--Sixty American Poets Speak to the World (University of Arkansas Press, 2013), and a regional editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East (Norton 2010).

Her Persian translation and reading of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (co-translated with Mohsen Emadi) was launched by the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in October 2012, in celebration of Whitman’s work. Find out more about Sholeh Wolpé here.

Bits and Bobs: The Year in Review, Sweet Hookup, Readings, Postings

On Monday, November 5 we began our Year in Review series.  We're posting selections from each of our guest bloggers.  We're sure you will be inspired to look for more work by our contributors and to buy their books as holiday gifts.  You can catch up by following the link above. And you can read posts by all of our guest bloggers, from the blog's beginning to the present, here. You will find remarkable work.

Jim Cummins continues to post from Cincinnati.

We solve your holiday shopping with this sweet-salty hookup. 

KGB Monday Night (12.10) Season Finale:  Mark Strand + Malachi Black

A Tribute to Louise Glück: December 14, 2012, 7:00 PM, The New School

-- sdh

The Year in Review: The Poetry Olympics by Kate Gale (October 23, 2012)

Writing poetry well should be like training yourself for the Olympics.  The poetry Olympics.  Even there are no gold medals, no silver or bronze, even though there are no endorsements, (I keep writing to Nike, “I run, I write poetry, give me shoes! But no luck.) even though the rewards of poetry are being able to go around saying, “I’m a poet,” which, if you throw in a couple dollars will get you coffee, in spite of that, you should take it seriously. 

For me, that means doing what they do in the Olympics, going through training.  When I meet with MFA students, they want to know how long it will take before they get their first book published.  Here’s what I think about:  When my kids were in karate, their teacher Ken Nagayama would say, “When an American enters the dojo, he likes to ask one question.  ‘How long will it take for me to get a black belt?’ That is not the right question.  That is not right thinking.  Right thinking is, ‘Is this a place where I can enter the lifelong study of martial arts and learn about what it means to be human using this art form?’ That is the right question.”

Can I enter the study of poetry here?  Is the right place for me at this time?  Are there poets I can learn from?  Red Hen Press has a list of about twenty core poets who know we have a slot for them every several years so they can focus on writing knowing their work has a home.  This list includes Percival Everett, Peggy Shumaker, Camille Dungy, Doug Kearney, David Mason, Cynthia Hogue, Jim Tilley, Kim Dower and Lisa C. Krueger.

We have three poets who have undertaken to enter the dojo of poetry and let the martial arts instructor take some serious swings at their work.  Lisa C. Krueger, who read last month at Poets House with David St. John and Phil Levine had two books out but wanted to see how daring and risk taking she could be with her third book.  She enrolled in the Bennington MFA program.  As an adult with a thriving Psychotherapy practice, it isn’t easy to become a student again, to submit to having your poetry—which feels like your children!—be whacked around by the throngs, to say nothing of the poets who lead the workshops, but that’s what she’s done.  The poems that have emerged are ferocious, they have bite and wild as if they were surrounded by wolves and learned to speak anyway. 

Jim Tilley retired from Morgan Stanley and dedicated himself to a life of language and ideas, but first to poetry.  He’s been to Breadloaf, to Squaw, to Palm Beach, and he keeps going.  Every summer.  He works on his craft as hard as he ever worked in the world of finance, and the result is amazing. Poems that walk between math, light and energy.  Poems that are precise and balanced, poems where the poet is paying attention to every word.

Kim Dower, a renowned publicist went back to poetry after an absence of twenty-five years and dedicated herself to attending the conferences where she could submit her poems to criticism.  She takes classes with Terry Wolverton, one of Los Angeles’ treasures both as poet and writing teacher.  Her second book, Slice of Moon will be out from Red Hen Press next year, and she is reading this weekend on Saturday at the Ruskin Art Club at 4 pm with Oliver de la Paz and Cynthia Hogue. 

Red Hen’s core poets have this in common.  They are not hoping for a black belt.  They have entered the life of poetry and are in there, in the muck and grime, the wet evenings, the long winters, the pages on the floor.  They’re not hoping for game, they are the game.  I salute all poets who are in it for the long haul, for entering language cracked and brittle and ending up with poems whole and humming.

 http://redhen.org/events/rhp-at-the-ruskin-art-club/

KATE GALE is Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review and President of the American Composers Forum, LA.  She teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction. She serves on the boards of A Room of Her Own Foundation and Poetry Society of America.  She is author of five books of poetry and six librettos including Rio de Sangre, a libretto for an opera with composer Don Davis which had its world premiere October 2010 at the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee.  Her current projects include a creative non-fiction book Flight of the Ugly Duckling, a co-written libretto, Paradises Lost with Ursula K. LeGuin and composer Stephen Taylor, and a libretto based on The Inner Circle by T. C. Boyle, based on Dr. Kinsey’s life with composer Daniel Felsenfeld.

The Year in Review: Tech Electric: Poetry and the Synchronicity of Sensory by Julie E. Bloemeke (October 19, 2012)

Monday’s blog began with my connection to the confluence of synchronicity as a means to the muse and poetry.  Throughout the week I have tried to open further conversation in regards to how technology is creating its own kismet through form and reach.  Today, I am hoping to both bring the conversation back to the visceral roots of Monday and send our dialogue into a new trajectory, to offer another place of intersection among technology, the sensory, the social and the "random" coincidence.

On Tuesday I explored poems that incorporate technology as an arc.  Today, I offer this question:  do you remember your first encounter with digital terminology or reference in a poem?  This may not be something that immediately comes to mind, but perhaps my experience here will further illuminate why I raise the question.  The first time I remembered seeing technology used as an integral force in creative writing was not in poetry.  It was in a Johnathan Ames short fiction piece called “A Young Girl,” published in the premiere issue of Swink (2004). In the story, the protagonist/writer, Leon David, receives an e-mail from Hallie a fan/grad student.  E-mail quickly progresses to instant message which escalates to a face-to-face meeting and sexual encounter. From anonymity to physical and sexual presence (and still a type of anonymity) in the space of three pages.  I remember being struck by the story mainly for its use of creating an intersection through technology.  Had Ames written the story before the advent of digital immediacy, its way of resonating on a variety of levels simply would not have been the same, or arguably, possible.  The unexpected e-mail—David even says “these correspondences keep me alive,”---the exchange of words over the screen before the voice, before in person, before sex, all contribute to the pace and tension of the story.  Something about it felt utterly irrevocable and fresh.

Fast forward to the present where digital reference and creative writing are not just components but are encouraging a very specific, and perhaps totally new, conversation. Earlier this week I referred to OCHO’s issue #24, an issue dedicated to poets who Twitter.*  And, while I cited one piece from the journal, I think it is important to note that a majority of the poems also offer a conversation around tech language, poetry, form and the digital world:  Two examples:  In “Village, Batanta Island,” Scott Edward Anderson creates a world where children interact because they can see themselves in a digital camera. Samuel Peralta, in “Sonnets B4 the Blaze,” plays in the language of technology, using end rhymes like “dot-com,” and “eBay.”   Both are works that could not exist without knowledge of and experience in a digital world.

But what happens when we go one step further?  When we center entire journal issues, chapbooks or anthologies around technology or a component of it?  Iron Horse Literary Review is a notable instance:  Issue 12:4 is a compelling array of poems and prose that orbit around planet Facebook.  It is a hotbed of social media inspiration, including poems that deconstruct, lament, explore and champion FB’s swerve and spectacle.  Jennifer A. Luebbers (“Ms. Barnhill is Back: A Poem in Found Facebook Status Updates”) and Tamiko Beyer (“September Update: Friend X”) create found poems from status updates culled from the FB newsfeed; Robert Fanning and Laura McCullough navigate the boundaries of F2F (face-to-face) interaction with family members versus FB lurking, poking, unfriending, etc. (And in the process, they also cause us to ponder the layers of language and technojargon in FB).  Fanning and Juliana Gray also play with form and rhyme in their poems as well—Fanning with rhyming couplets, Gray with the ghazal (end word: Facebook).  Dinty W. Moore offers his piece—“Why I Trained My Dog to Post: One Writer’s Facebook Journey,”-- with this introductory question:  “Can a chronological string of Facebook wall postings create a narrative?” and later shares an edited stream of his FB wall posts with this codicil:  “Though I’ve edited away much of the repetition and detritus, what you read below represents an accurate, purely chronological and possibly embarrassing chronicle of the time I’ve wasted.  Let it be a cautionary tale.” In essence, Moore causes us to wonder how to define, or if we can define, this particular genre.  And Steve Langan in “Ugly Kids,” goes back to the idea of kismet, of what it means when technology enables us to find the unfound, when we can “friend” a person from our past, a person often characterized more by our memory of the person than the flesh-and-blood person:

“Twenty-five years later, many of these people

start to come back into your life.

Blame technology.  Consider yourself warned.

All but the one who truly fascinated us,

over whose whereabouts, opinion and future

we speculated endlessly, back when

there was nothing else to do but think.”

On Valentine’s Day, 2012—definitely not a random day, considering-- Jasper Magazine and Muddy Ford Press took social media/social networking poetry a step further:  the chapbook.  Jasper Reads, Download is an entire collaboration that revolves around poetry and prose of the digital world.  The bent is decidedly erotic; almost every poem in the chapbook plays with the nuances and multiple entendres of technospeak.  In Nicola Waldron’s “Face Time” we experience contradictory intimacy of the sexual over video chat: “I slide down on my back/and press my fingers to the screen,/the thermal image app,/its thick curtain, then stroke it open,/touch the place that takes you,/the camera’s feral eye.” In “Smart Phone,” Lauren Wiggins makes a heady list of jargon, causing the reader to stop and consider the language on multiple levels:  “I’m not talking about/vibrate setting, call waiting,/nor voice-activated dialing,/not even 4G networking or hot spot detection.”  Often the results have a sense of humor, turning the language back on itself:  Barbara G.S. Hagerty’s “The Kids Don’t Know Everything:  “To our kids, we are so yesterday, so over it,/so you know, analogue...” 

But Jasper Reads, Download also offers a new window (dare I point out the word choice here) into the realm of connection and confluence.  The poems and prose therein are a glimpse into the tech electric—perhaps the tech erotic?-- as an exploration of the suggestiveness of communication when we are both connected and disconnected in the realm of computers and iPhones. There is a definite sense of play, tease and flirt, as in Dustin Brookshire’s found poem on Grindr: “For Midtown on Grindr,” “Message me…/if your passport has been/worked as much as your body” or in Ed Madden’s** “Sometimes its all I think about, too:”  “The dog-day cicadas are dialing up--/horny little modems buzzing in the oaks.” 

Which brings us back to this idea of how poems are becoming more of a direct sensory experience.  I think of Dickey writing about how books “call” us (again the word choice) from the shelves.  But what happens when the lines or the poems choose us more directly, flash to us—here we have to ask, randomly?—as a text message?  For instance, if you enable your cellphone to receive messages from Cellpoems, a link to a poem can buzz to you at any time.  Unlike PoemFlow, which requires its users to open the app to see the poem for the day, Cellpoems arrive directly to you on their time. Suddenly the poem becomes not just about the experience on the page, but a multi-sensory and very personal, well, encounter?  Perhaps the poem (and the body?) electric?  As the poem buzzes into your hand, it is not only visual and auditory but also tactile.  The poem, as text message, not only lends that first vibration (again, the language rife with possibilities), but also presents a text that can be immediately manipulated:  the poem can be touched on the screen, enlarged, photographed, shared.  Endless possibilities for confluence. 

As a young mom, I remembered, especially on days where poetry seemed a distant universe, waiting for the morning hour to strike 10:55 so that I might shush the baby for just a few minutes to catch Garrison Keillor on the Writer’s Almanac.  In the throes of no sleep and making a slow progression out of postpartum depression, it was these few daily moments that were often my grace.  It was here that I learned about the poetry of Barbara Crooker, Brad Sachs, Matt Cook, Wendy Cope, Michael Chitwood and was reminded of my love for other poets I may have been neglecting:  Blake. Kumin. May Sarton. 

The experience offered poetry on so many levels that resonated with me.  There was the sense of randomness, of not knowing which poem I would experience that day.  There was intrigue of hearing a poem though Keillor’s voice, the feeling of being taken outside of my life for the moment.  The poem was not on paper, not visual or tactile, but it was more in my body, reminding me often of that heady cocktail of mental and physical that I mentioned on Monday.  And the poem was always a surprise, an enticement, a journey.  And sometimes even, just for a moment, an impetus to return to my own writing.

But could there be more?  Something further sensory?  Even more direct?  I think there just may be.  I offer this as a point of muse.  Recently a fellow poet e-mailed to ask if I had a few uninterrupted minutes.  Sure.  He asked if I had my phone.  I did.  He began to text me a poem he was working on, breaking each line by hitting “send.”  So, my first experience of the poem went like this: flash of phone light up/buzz, read line. Pause. Light up/buzz, read next line.  The entire poem arrived this way:  Visual.  Auditory.  Tactile.  It demanded my attention, leaving the lingering sense of vibration in my hand.  This was not reading on the page.  It was intimate.  Direct.  Curious with possibility.  The poem touching me.  Visceral.  Rife with kismet. 

Dickey said the poem called to us from the shelves.  Maybe the reverse is true.  Maybe the poem calls us from the shelves, into the body, back into words.  The connection, or reconnection of the two.

In my case it was a calling.  I was called by name, like a song I could finally hear, like a something I—and maybe the rest of us—are only beginning to know the beginning of.

                                                                                                              ----Julie E. Bloemeke 

It is with great thanks that I sign off this week.  Much gratitude to David Lehman and Stacey Harwood for this fantastic forum.

Thank you, dear reader, for sharing your stories and intersections, for raising questions and continuing the conversation.  Let’s keep talking.

And thank you to the following kind souls—and kismet energies!-- who were incredibly helpful in offering insight, support, discussion, enthusiasm and a keen editing eye.  Thank you for bearing with the poet of me who does not usually call prose “home”:

Beth Gylys

Bella Pollen

Howie Axelrod

Jan Clausen

Peggy Ingraham

Reb Livingston

Collin Kelley

Deborah Bernhardt

And one last note of gratitude to the haven that is VCCA. The gift of a residency granted me the time and creative space needed to compose, edit and muse properly on the words.  Oh, yes, and a lake to swim in for when the words confounded me.

Please keep, as we say, in touch: 

On Twitter:  @jebloemeke

*I regret to share this news.  After publishing Tuesday’s blog I learned that JS VanBuskirk died a few years ago.  My apologies for the oversight.

** Ed Madden has also compiled an arrangement of found poems on Craigslist, all gleaned from ads placed in January and February 2012. “Missed Connections: Craigslist Found Poems” was inspired by Alan Feuer’s “Inebriated Love” (New York Times, 22 January 2012)

The Year in Review: Auden on Prayer Book Revision: No More Mr. Nice Guy? by J. Chester Johnson (October 8, 2012)

When the article, “On Working with W. H. Auden on The Psalms,” appeared here, I received a number of questions and requests for more information.  So, I’m taking this opportunity to respond – at least, in part.

I’ve noticed it came as a complete surprise to many persons that W. H. Auden was so fully engaged, intellectually and emotionally, in the Episcopal Church’s revision of THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, begun in earnest in the late 1960s. While a portion of his views on the subject was included in the article, associated material by and about Auden on the revision project is also contained in the final pages of Later Auden, the most recent biography by Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor and principal biographer.  To receive a little more flavor of the intensity of Auden’s perspective toward the subject, add the following excerpt from one of his letters:

“What has happened over the last few years has made me realize that those who rioted when Cranmer introduced a vernacular liturgy were right.  When this reform nonsense started, what we should have done is the exact opposite of the Roman Catholics: we should have said ‘Henceforth, we will have the Book of Common Prayer in Latin.’ (There happens to be an excellent translation.)”

These views were further clarified and emphasized in the considerable communication that exists on various aspects of the revision process between Auden and Canon Charles Guilbert, who was, at the time, the Custodian of THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER of the Episcopal Church.  The basis for Auden’s fundamental aversion to the revision can be summed up, I believe, in this thoughtful and quite eloquent excerpt from a letter, dated March 19^th, 1968, to Guilbert:

“We had the Providential good-fortune, a blessing denied to the Roman Catholics, that our Prayer Book was compiled at the ideal historical moment, that is to say, when the English Language was already in all essentials the language we use now – nobody has any difficulty understanding Shakespeare’s or Cranmer’s English, as they have difficulty with Beowulf or Chaucer – at the same time, men in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries still possessed what our own has almost totally lost, a sense for the ceremonial and ritual both in life and in language.”

Although Auden’s ideas were decidedly contrary to much of the revision project, they were not as vehement regarding the psalm retranslation for which he served on the drafting committee before returning to Europe to live. In this respect, since the two of us held the position of poets on the committee, I’ve been asked from time to time if I could identify specific Auden contributions to the retranslated psalms, now contained in THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. As a consequence of my joining the committee sometime after Auden had become a member, combined with his heavy schedule – mainly, Auden’s frequent trips to Europe and his eventual move from New York City – we never attended the same meetings of the drafting committee.Therefore, I cannot be an original source for Auden’s textual offerings to the finally adopted psalm retranslations. Nonetheless, I was, of course, very interested in the specific recommendations Auden would have made to the committee, and I inquired during my participation on the committee about those contributions. It should be obvious and noted that a true rendering of the translated meaning of the considered text, as a matter of principle, preceded, for obvious reasons, any contribution by either poet.  Before the poets’ assistance was invoked, the scholars on the drafting committee traced, to determine if mistranslations surfaced at points along the trail, received text from the original Hebrew through the Greek (Septuagint), through Old Latin, and through St. Jerome’s Latin revision to Miles Coverdale’s 16^thcentury translation, which also relied, in part, on Luther’s German Bible and which constituted, with little adjustment, the psalms contained in THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER for virtually the book’s entire life. One final step for the committee also involved a review of the 1928 version of THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, which had accomplished a few modest adjustments to Coverdale.

According to comments of the chairman of the drafting committee, with whom I worked closely on the retranslation for more than five years to completion of the project, Auden provided three memorable contributions to the adopted retranslation:  In psalm 27, he replaced “secret place” in both Coverdale and the 1928 version with “secrecy”; for psalm 42, he replaced “water pipes” in Coverdale and “water floods” in the 1928 version with “cataracts”; and for psalm 95, he replaced “prepared” in both Coverdale and the 1928 version with “molded.”  I also believe Auden made an additional and fourth contribution: He presented forceful pleas for the committee to retain a variety of inherited language; for example, I know he argued for the preservation of this line from psalm 122: “Jerusalem is built as a city that is at unity with itself,” and that is what one finds today in THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.  I’d not be surprised at all if a few more traditional lines were also saved through his erudition and zeal.

Notwithstanding the deep reservations he held about the general revision, Auden still felt compelled to offer help, reflecting, among other things, his ties to both the institution and the qualities of the traditional liturgy. At one point in the correspondence, Auden writes to Guilbert, “I should be honored and delighted to serve in any capacity on the Standing Liturgical Commission.”  I also believe the offer to assist illustrated a genuine generosity and good will, which unfortunately do not comport with the judgment, among many people, that Auden regularly exhibited a honed curmudgeon attitude.  My interchange with W. H. Auden can not confirm this latter view; a person of strong ideas he was – with polymathic knowledge and precise proportion at his fingertips to enhance and justify those views, but he was mostly accessible and transparent and not rude, arrogant, or routinely short – not from my experience.

 I distinctly remember my first encounter with him. In my early 20s, I decided to try out New York City as a place to live – during the late 1960s. Early on in the settling process, I found myself thumbing through the mammoth Manhattan phone book, and either accidentally or by intense curiosity, I unearthed the name, W. H. Auden. Now, surely, the poet would not be so open as to list himself in the phone book for everyone to know the number – I assumed it was just a duplicate name in the gargantuan city.  Yet, to confirm my conclusion, I decided to call – the hubris of the young at play.  Someone picked up the phone, and I began to inquire: “Is this W. H. Auden?” “Yes.”  “Is this the poet, W. H. Auden?” “Yes.”  It couldn’t be, could it? So, I started to stumble and stutter into some comment about how much I admired and enjoyed his verse.  He immediately made me feel at ease, and we talked for awhile – I didn’t feel rushed to jump off the phone.  Little did I know that, in four years, I’d be communicating with him over the retranslation of the psalms for THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.

There is also a story involving Edward Mendelson that corresponds with my own, both of which could possibly help shed some of Auden’s adhering reputation among some people for brief tolerance and quick severity.  Mendelson, an assistant professor at Yale at the time, had been given the job of serving as Auden’s chaperon and guide on a visit the poet made to the campus to talk with students and to record his poems.  During the stay, Auden mentioned to Mendelson that he wanted to put together a new collection of his essays, to be titled FOREWORDS AND AFTERWORDS; however, Auden didn’t remember what he had written, to which Mendelson replied that he had copied all of Auden’s essays, which were then in Mendelson’s apartment.  Auden, obviously pleased, spent a few hours with the copies but then said he would need to return at a later date in order to read all of the essays. Following the trip to Yale, after Auden had announced his departure for England, he wrote to Mendelson asking that he, Mendelson, make the selections for him, and sent a check for $150 to cover the costs of copying.  In turn, Mendelson put together a preliminary list of contents, which Auden reviewed and amended; Mendelson, a few days later, sent a sheaf of copies to Auden.  Sometime after these exchanges, Auden asked Mendelson to be his literary executor. And still later, Mendelson remitted a check to Auden for $40, the sum remaining after the costs of copying and mailing were paid.  When Auden received the check, it apparently became a celebratory moment for him and Chester Kallman, with much waving of the check, for, as then exclaimed, they had, at last, found an honest man.      

Mendelson chose to end his biography, LATER AUDEN, with attention to the poet’s fervid concentration on liturgy and the conduct of worship. Considering the remarkable focus and energy Auden placed on these issues during the last years of his life, there could be no more fitting way to close the final chapter on the poet’s life. 

J. Chester Johnson has written verse for over forty years.  His work received praise from writers and poets spanning several decades  –  from, among others, Allen Tate and Nobel Laureate I. B. Singer to current, well-known poets, such as Molly Peacock and Major Jackson, who commented, regarding Johnson’s most recent volume, St. Paul’s Chapel & Selected Shorter Poems: “Undoubtedly, this is a work headed for literary permanence in our collective ear.”  In his 20s, Johnson served with W. H. Auden as the two poets for the retranslation of the Psalms, as now contained in The Book of Common Prayer. For the last ten years, “St. Paul’s Chapel,” the signature poem for his recent book of verse, has been the memento card for the approximately 30,000 weekly visitors to the Chapel at Ground Zero.

The Year in Review: Lasagna and Marge by Nancy Davidoff Kelton (October 4, 2012)

 In her 70s, my mother began to call some women “Marge.”

The real Marge, a kind, caring neighbor, visited my parents with homemade cookies and condominium gossip. She enjoyed my mother’s company. She and my mother had great rapport.  Mostly, Marge appreciated my quirky, unconventional mother. Mom felt safe with Marge.

The first new Marge was my parents’ regular waitress at the Florida deli where they ate breakfast. She greeted them each morning with a warm hello and a basket of rolls, and then conversed as she brought their usual egg order along with a white paper bag for the uneaten rolls. When I counted eight bags in the freezer, Mom said, “Marge at the restaurant doesn’t want us to run out.”

Other Marges included her longtime hairdresser and a doting home aide. On one of the aide’s days off, my mother fell, broke her pelvis, spent three weeks in the hospital, and then another three in the rehab unit of a nursing home. During that time, my father got pneumonia and died.

In my mother’s absence, the doting aide found a new job. I explored other homecare options. None felt right. With enormous guilt, but little choice, I moved my mother in a nursing home in Buffalo, our hometown.

In time, Mom blossomed.  Her sass and wit returned.  She looked and sounded happier and more relaxed than she had been as shut-in the condo when my father was alive. Except for a scowling night aide, she called “Lasagna” the staff showered her with attention and found her fun to be around.

“Let’s leave this dump, Marge,” she told her favorite aide one day while I was there. “My daughter’s crazy and I’m missing something important.”

“What?” the aide asked.

“A man.”

“What’ll you do with a man, Esther?”

Mom said, “Neck around.”

Another Marge polished her nails with wild colors. A kitchen Marge gave her lots of attention and bags of rolls to go.

I was grateful my mother found Marges. Then one by one, they left. Mom began to complain. About the food, her stomach, bedtime, and Lasagna.

One afternoon, when we were sitting together in the living area and Lasagna was sitting there by herself, my mother, fidgeting and glancing from her to me, said, “Lasagna doesn’t like me.”

“Lasagna doesn’t seem to like anyone, Mom.”

“She’s mean at bedtime. Why can’t I come with you?”

Ouch!  I spoke to the social worker before leaving. In the car, I thought about 8-year-old me many moons before, stuck in the children’s dining room at a Catskills resort. “Why can’t I eat with you?” I pleaded with my parents after only one uncomfortable meal. For the rest of that vacation, I sat in the main dining room between my mom and dad.

I was not as good a parent to my 85-year-old mom.

Later that month, my mother died. The doctor wrote ‘heart attack’ on the death certificate. He told me she’d been asleep. When I picked up her belongings, Lasagna was on duty. “Sorry about your mother,” she said.

I thanked her. “Was she okay at bedtime?”

“Fine.”  Lasagna walked away.

I pray my mother died without harm or fear. I pray she found bags of rolls in heaven and angels she calls Marge.

Nancy Davidoff Kelton is the author of 6 books. Her essays have appeared in several sections of The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Buffalo News, More, and Redbook among numerous other publications. She blogs over at  LOVE 'N STUFF.  Nancy teaches writing at the New School, NYU, and Hunter College.

The Year in Review: Blue and Sentimental by Ira Sadoff (September 27, 2012)

Last day of blogging and “I’m sweating a lot by now” which is a line from O’Hara’s tribute to Billie Holiday and arguably the best elegy about jazz ever written (“The Day Lady Died”). In my less than grand finale, I want to throw some tunes at you: Ballads, sad tunes that acknowledge the love affairs,  troubled or done for, seeming deprivations and losses that plague us, feelings elegiac or just those inexplicable moments where a dark spot shadows us and that feelihng needs to be expressed and shared.

I count myself among the multitudes of jazz fans who love Holiday’s late recordings (52-56 especially) where her voice and heart are broken.She has maybe an octave left in her voice, but she’s so incredibly expressive it hurts all the more. She accomplishes so much with her phrasing and the grainy quavering in her pitch that you’d swear, even when singing Ellington tunes like “Sophisticated Lady,” she was singing her autobiography. Ben Webster, maybe the greatest balladeer, plays behind her. Skip the ten second ad when you can.

Billie Holiday "Sophisticated Lady"

Though I’ve been extolling the virtues of adventurous jazz this week I don’t want to forget that I also love jazz and poetry of yore (how’s that for diction), art that speaks to the heart seemingly more directly with melancholy or longing. When someone else’s sadness speaks to mine I don’t generally feel “down” but rather I feel less alone. I frankly don’t understand people who don’t listen to music that’s sad or who avoid movies that deal with difficult (as in real) emotions. And I see no contradiction in being transported by art that grows out of another time just because I aspire to write adventurously. After all, we love to listen to Bach and Mozart, and who but the most rigid formalists would think we should still compose like them (for a less glib response, my HISTORY MATTERS confronts some questions about composition, time and flux).

  So I’m open to the “breath-taking” solos of Ben Webster, in tunes like “Where are You?” and “Ill Wind” and let them break my heart(again and again). You’ll have to put up with 10 seconds of an ad for dishwasher ads in a number of these cuts (I swear: this is such a great country) to listen to this beautiful version of “My Romance.”

 Ben Webster ":My Romance"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l7xYNbunXU And no one can play “Laura” like Don Byas (I alluded to his work in the James Carter entry yesterday).

Don Byas "Laura"

Then there’s Dexter Gordon, though I think he coasted through his later years: the tunes are still pretty. There’s Benny Carter’s “Flamingo” and “Blue Star” (he was lively right to the end), Gene Ammons’ “Goodbye”; there’s any ballad by Lockjaw Davis; late in his life Stan Getz became a beautiful ballad player, and Ike Quebec’s tear-jerker, “Blue and Sentimental” with guitarist Grant Green in the background could melt an iceberg.

Ike Quebec, "Blue and Sentimental"

But perhaps no one can play more sweet and sensitively and noir-like than Johnny Hodges. Here’s “Daydream,” but he plays an infinite number of beautiful ballads and you should hear them all.

Johnny Hodges "Day Dream"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoBhmxHgHig Slightly more contemporary ballads? I love the ballad playing of Chico Freeman in SPIRIT SENSITIVE. Here’s his “Autumn in New York,” from that album.

Chico Freeman, "Autumn in New York"

Coltrane’s an amazing ballad player (“Out of This World” and “I Want to Talk About You”) and composer (“Naima” anyone? )and his accompaniment of Johnny Hartmann (alias Billy Eckstine the second) is rightfully legendary. Off the top of my head I’m thinking of Marion Brown’s version of Coltrane’s “After the Rain,” the throaty Archie Shepp at Montreux in 1977-8, and Abraham Burton’s Punta Lullabye” from CAUSE AND EFFECT (god he should be better known). Here’s that cut.

Abraham Burton "Punta Lullabye"

On the trumpet there’s of course Miles and Chet Baker before drugs take over his life, and Bakida Carroll, and so many others. And to end where I started, there are the vocalists: Sarah Vaughan’s beautiful instrument darkens, there’s Shirley Horn (a special romantic place in my heart that involves a certain person) and early Betty Carter; there’s Sheila Jordan, and the more extreme and dramatic and over the top singers I really love like Helen Merrill and the late work on Muse by Morgana King.

There are too many other lifelong pleasures to name. Such joy in that sadness.

This blog entry momentarily makes me think I should have continued my career as a disc jockey. In college I had an all-night jazz show on WRNJ, high above the Ritz Carleton in Atlantic City New Jersey – this before Donald Trump did such wonders with the town. But then I remember I had to walk the streets knocking on merchant’s doors asking them to buy ad time on a third-rate FM station. I got one account and even that didn’t bring me real money. I just got one meal a day at a fish(y) restaurant. Maybe it was all those scallops and not my conscience that turned me into a vegetarian the very next year!

I’ll end with this acknowledgment page: Thanks to BESTAMERICAN POETRY for giving me the opportunity to share my passions. I’ve enjoyed for so long the joys of other poets’ thoughts and I’ve been remiss in not writing to some of them to thank them. It’s a great blog.

OK, jazz is an African-american art. White folks surely can play the music and listen with pleasure, but the art’s more meaningful when we understand something about the tradition and the history that informs it. Like any art, the more you know, the more you can hear and appreciate (yes you do have to read poetry endlessly if you even have a prayer to become a good poet). Jazz is almost uniquely a communal, improvisatory, art: it builds on tunes that have histories in that community, it speaks from the heart of gospel and the black church, it’s a close cousin of the blues. It acknowledges, inhabits and transcends centuries of oppression. Jazz responds to that history, in its rage and melancholy and resignation, in its happy blues, and its other-worldly aspirations. If we don’t have a more lively jazz world today it’s because so many of the clubs where musicians used to learn their trade are gone; listeners had so many more opportunities to hear the art live (which is the art at its best. There are many reasons for those closings, our culture’s current devaluation of art in general, the cost of maintaining a club in cities given the cost of living and inequities of late capitalism. You can put some of the blame on jazz as an academic activity. And I’m leaving out a thousand other reasons for how jazz has been marginalized in the culture. So here’s to places like the Village Vanguard and more to those little clubs opening up even now to give young players a chance to show their wares.

Finally, thanks to readers of the blog -- though the community I dream of consists of is sitting in a chair and listening together, putting on one CD or record album (I still have them) after the next. Better still sitting at a rickety-table and sharing personally that passion with the artists only feet away from us, with a good glass of wine and, as we aspire for our own art, taking in the pleasure of feeling. Deeply and often.

 BOA EDITIONS just published Ira Sadoff's new collection of poems, TRUE FAITH. He teaches in the Drew MFA program and is currently on sabbatical, living in a converted barn, listening to a lot of music and doing his best to write new poems.

The Year in Review: Poetry, Community, and Identity, An Essay in Installments--Part 5 by Jonathan Farmer (September 21, 2012)

Reading and writing are solitary pleasures, and yet both can offer a profound sense of connection. Writing these posts, I hear what I always do when I write, a version of my own voice, sometimes confident—as though I’m convinced by my own posture that someone wants to hear what I’m saying—sometimes trying too hard to sound confident, as though I’m fighting against the vulnerability of it all. After all these years of writing, I still haven’t learned how to write without aspiring to authority (pun intended, I guess), which is (he writes with apparent confidence) one of my biggest weaknesses.

I taught “Saint Judas” the other day, and the poem’s last line has been on my mind. “I held the man for nothing in my arms.” For nothing—for free, and for no reason, with no hope. Judas is redeemed—exchanged into meaning, into life—only when he doesn’t seek any compensation. We want our love to matter. We want to build monuments to our love*. But when we do so, even inspired by our love, we begin to misconstrue. Or, if not misconstrue, reveal. That we are human, that we want to be more than human, that in our moments of selflessness some self-interest lurks. Nothing grotesque, necessarily. Just a wish for this passion to be valuable, meaningful, true.

So it is when we love poems, and even more so when we love poetry, when we become, in some public way, people who read, write, love poems. We want to redeem our love. And so we do build monuments—National Poetry Month; “men die miserably every day.” And sometimes (I think) we misconstrue and reveal and we get territorial, and love looks less like love than a domain.

“Love should be put into action!” shouted Elizabeth Bishop’s hermit. And then the echo “tried and tried to confirm it,” the slightly funny feminine (can we come up with a better term for this?) rhyme mocking as gently as the echo itself. When I started writing poems, I was certain that what I was doing mattered. I could feel it. Now, as I grow less convinced that poetry matters in its own right and, maybe related, less convinced that my own writing has particular worth, I find I’m more drawn to usefulness—teaching, publishing, writing criticism. I think of the people who go into prisons and teach poems, who do indeed put their love into action, and powerfully so. And I think of the poets and critics who look for a political purpose in their art, sometimes plausibly, sometimes less so.

This is all a long way of saying something painfully obvious: when we write or read or teach poems, we’re still people. And if the poem serves as a cue for us to think and hear in a slightly different key, that’s only a translation. We still do the things people everywhere do—we delude ourselves, we get carried away, we answer to or resist the codes of behavior we’ve learned, we try to place ourselves in relationship to others.

I’m always amused by Larkin’s title: The Less Deceived. It’s a hilarious boast—superiority as humility, like Socrates bragging that he was the only person who knew how little he knew. But these are the kinds of calculations we make when we make or find meaning, conscious or unconscious balancings between grandeur and humility. We congratulate ourselves on having thrown off the fussy old costumes, unaware that we’re in a new costume now (I read somewhere that the wardrobe of the Hasidim began as a rejection of the outdated and overly formal religious clothing of the time.) It’s easy to get tired of it, and I do long to hold something “for nothing,” but of course that desire has already given it a purpose.

We live in the world, and sometimes we live so deeply inside it that we forget we’re there. I know plenty of people find that idea unappealing, want poetry to disenchant, and sometimes I want that, too. But it’s worth remembering that even there, we’re finding a kind of enchantment, a sense that we will, for instance, enact radical, societal change by writing poems most people won’t want to read. That’s no reason not to write them—many of them are wonderful (pun intended here, too, I guess)—but it is a good reason to be humble about it all.

I don’t mean to be bleak. The good news, too, is that we read and write as humans, even in our aspiration to be less fallibly human, even in the double calculation of trying to be the less deceived. It’s worth being a person, I think. There’s certainly plenty of company to be found there, and the odd mix of humility and aspiration it entails appeals to me. I no longer believe poems or poetry are essential. I haven’t believed that for a very long time. But I still sometimes experience them as though they are, and it’s nice to have people around who sometimes feel the same.

 

You can read the other sections of this essay here:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4 

*Yesterday, after I had finished the first few paragraphs of this, a review copy of Susan Wheeler’s meme showed up in the mail. It contains the following lines from Propertius, translated by G.P. Goold: “As for the poems you composed in my honor,/burn them, I pray: cease to win praise through me.”

Jonathan Farmer is the Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor of At Length Magazine and the poetry critic for The Slate Book Review. He teaches at The Hawbridge School in Saxapahaw, NC, and lives with his wife, Caroline Luther, (and their cat, Hopkins, also pictured here) in Durham, NC.

The Year in Review: A Poem and a Mistake (and an Error) by Amy McDaniel (September 12, 2012)

Ovid claimed that the cause of his exile to Tomis was carmen et error -- a poem and a mistake.

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about mistakes and errors. In everyday usage, these can be interchangeable, but for our purposes, they do refer to two distinct ways to get something wrong. Let's let Aristotle explain:

Within the art of poetry itself there are two kinds of faults—those which touch its essence, and those which are accidental. If a poet has chosen to imitate something, [but has imitated it incorrectly] through want of capacity, the error is inherent in the poetry. But if the failure is due to a wrong choice—if he has represented a horse as throwing out both his off legs at once, or introduced technical inaccuracies in medicine, for example, or in any other art—the error is not essential to the poetry.

So: capacity versus choice. An error touches the essence, a mistake does not. "I didn't see that coming" (capacity of vision) versus "I should have seen that coming" (choice of where to cast your gaze). When I taught in Bangladesh, this distinction was particularly salient as I tried to figure out whether my students' misuses of English stemmed from not knowing the rule (an error) or from forgetting or ignoring the rule (a mistake). 

This became even more complicated with my poetry students. What is an error in English might not touch, as Aristotle puts it, the essence of the poem. In yesterday's post, I printed two poems by one of my students. The idioms are not always standard. She writes, "I want to leave here but I had lost myself in deep of darkness."

Would a native English speaker use this idiom instead of "in the depths of darkness?" Or, in the first poem, the line "steal my accompany" instead of "companion," when referring to the shadow stolen by the sun? Probably not, and so much the worse. There is something essentially right about using "accompany" as a noun for "that which accompanies me," given that "accompaniment" sounds too cold and still and "companion" too warm and human. The poem is cool; the shadow is between thing and being. 

A poem and a mistake. My students knew exile. Not only were they away from their homes, among sudden peers of many different faiths, nationalities, backgrounds, but some of them had spent part of their childhood as refugees. We read lots of poems about exile and foreignness. For them, language was already estranged from habit and custom. It would be an error to think there is no room for a mistake in a poem.  

Originally from Atlanta, Amy McDaniel  is the author of the poetry chapbook, Selected Adult Lessons (Agnes Fox Press). Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in The Agriculture Reader, h_ngm_n, RealPoetik, Tin House, Alimentum, Saveur, PANK, and elsewhere.

The Year in Review: A New Way to Listen by Lisa Vihos (August 22, 2012)

Lisa Vihos

So, I was contemplating my reading to celebrate the publication of my new chapbook, The Accidental Present (Finishing Line Press, 2012). The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to hear myself go on for a half hour or more, as much as I like my poems. It occurred to me that many of them might be done better justice if read by other people, some of them not necessarily poets, just friends, coworkers, and neighbors who have good voices and strong characters. Imagine that!

And so was born the idea for my "poetic happening," a "community poetry read" in which the majority of my poems would be read by others. There are 22 poems in the chapbook, and I had fifteen readers each read one poem. I read three, one of which was the title poem. We went through the poems in the order that they appear, skipping a couple along the way. Hearing them read aloud that way, I discovered I had put them in an order for a reason. More surprises.

I had assigned the poems in the two weeks prior to the reading, so that my designated readers had a chance to familiarize themselves with the words. I did not "test" anyone before the reading. I just trusted them to do the best they could, even though some of them told me they were nervous. Some were afraid that they would not do the particular poem justice.

Let me say right here, not a single person disappointed me. In the moments when the readers were on stage, I was blown away by the care with which each person read. I could tell that each person had clearly practiced, and had thought about giving the assigned poem some personal power from his or her own inner repertoire of thought and emotion.

For me, it was as though all the voices in my head that I cannot actually speak the way I hear them came to life during that 45 minutes. There was the voice of the angry woman, the loving man, and the anguished poet. Janet, who is in her 80s, read a poem in defiance of getting old. Lynn, who is seeking to grow and evolve, read a poem about just that. Ed, who had some training in the monastery many eons ago, read a poem with scriptural references, and Al, who has the slightest southern drawl and an occasional stammer, read a poem in which God invites us to stop complaining and join him for a shot of tequila.

If I may say, the effect was quite mesmerizing.

It was something theatrical, layered, magical. Yes, they are "my" poems, but I like to think that they belong to the world, and hearing others read them made that real for a short while. Lest you would question the sanity of a poet not reading her own work, please read more about the evening from the perspective of an observer, essayist and Stoneboat associate editor, Signe Jorgenson, who witnessed the whole thing:

And, if you need to treat yourself to something really enriching one of these days, get your friends to read your poems for you at your next reading. You will be amazed at how wonderful you sound when it is not the sound of your own voice you hear.

The Year in Review: Shouldn't the Sonnet? [by Sandra Simonds, August 15, 2012]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Picture: Steve McCaffery, the structure of the sonnet

I.                    Is the Sonnet a Fascist Form?

 Somewhere, supposedly, William Carlos Williams calls the sonnet “a Fascist form.” Can someone tell me if this is true? I asked a number of poet friends, looked and looked, but couldn’t find the quote ANYWHERE. Even if he didn’t write it, the phrase has an irresistible ring to it and lots and lots of poets agree that writing in any form is like being told what to do by an authoritarian jerk. But…wait a second…I’ve read poems by Fascists and the poems don’t look anything like sonnets. Not even close.  All that those poems do is praise guns and airplanes in long, messy lines.  So, what’s the deal? I guess even Fascists don’t write in Fascist forms.

 

II.                  Sonnets and Power

 Now, it’s easy for me to fool myself into thinking that I’m in love so sometimes I get all tangled up in love triangles, squares and octagons. Maybe it’s a poet’s disease. Last summer my partner and I had a whole bunch of problems that eventually led to a seven month separation. During that time, I thought that I had fallen in love with a few men at the same time (all poets, of course, since they suffer from the same disease) which culminated in my buying a plane ticket (never used) to meet a man on the internet I’d never met who kept saying nice things to me (and my poetry) on Facebook. I know, I know—it’s pathetic and embarrassing but here’s the thing, at the same time as all of this messy stuff was happening, I was writing sonnet after sonnet so I couldn’t stop myself from getting involved deeper and deeper in all of these pretend romances because I swear to god it was totally helping my poetry.

Auden talks about how Shakespeare‘s Dark Lady sonnets are all about the humiliation that comes with what he calls the “Vision of Eros.”  Basically, what he says is that when the Dark Lady becomes a real person, and not an object that he can control, he gets frustrated because he never really liked her in the first place. He’s just trapped in his own sexual obsession and frustration. Exactly! I was never really in love with these men, but I did want them to want me, like it was a game, a game perfect for TRANSLATION into the sonnet form. In real life relationships people are always vying for power but in the sonnet, it’s the poet and the sonnet that are in a struggle to the death. The problem is that the poet is at a huge disadvantage because the sonnet has the history OF THE SONNET on its side and almost always wins.  As Sina Queyras asks in an essay on the sonnet for the Harriet Blog: “Are you writing the “writing the sonnet or is the sonnet writing you?”

 

 III.                How Do We Define the Contemporary Sonnet?

There’s no consensus on how to do it. Does it have to have a traditional rhyme scheme? Does it need to be written in iambic pentameter? Does it have to be about unrequited love?  Does it even need to be fourteen lines? Ask twenty poets these questions, and you’ll get two-hundred answers. And simply calling a sonnet a sonnet doesn’t really make it a sonnet.

I decided that I would call my sonnets “sonnets” when they become worthy of passing through the gates of Sandra’s GREAT BOOK of Sonnets, a quasi-mystical anthology of sonnets that I have compiled and that is housed in a three ring binder in my desk. My teacher in PhD school, David Kirby, taught me how to do this. Whenever I come across a sonnet that is fit to enter Sandra’s GREAT BOOK of Sonnets, I type it out, print it and add it to the book. I try to memorize the extra-special ones.

One of the poems I have recently added is from Great Balls of Fire (Coffee House Press, 1990) by Ron Padgett:

   Nothing in That Drawer

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

 

I love Padgett’s simultaneous reverence and irreverence towards the sonnet expressed through the play between content and form. As Stephen Burt and David Mikics write in the introduction to The Art of the Sonnet, the sonnet is a form of, “rapturous praise, bitter exclamation, and step-by-step reasoning” but this example turns all of these notions upside-down. Even as the poem takes on the quality of a joke, the joke isn’t shallow or without a deep understanding of the sonnet’s history of posing a problem that it seeks to, if not solve, explore. I love that the empty drawers, line by line, come together to build a chest of emptiness. The take home message here seems to be that every time you write a really good sonnet, it’s kind of creepy like building a piece of furniture with the ghosts of history. One day someone is going to open one of Padgett’s drawers and some monster is going to pop out and scare the crap out of the reader.

 IV.                Bernadette Mayer

 Bernadette Mayer’s sonnets are captivating for all of the wrong reasons. Most of her sonnets aren’t even sonnets. In an essay posted on Jacket, Juliana Spahr writes that “one of Mayer's sonnets has a long prose note attached to it on landlords and rent. Another has eight lines. Another twenty-seven. Some rhyme in doggerel. Some in more elaborate patterns. Some have regular rhythm. Some not. The grammar continually violates the conventional regularities of the sonnet. Lines are split, are jammed; they spill over. Metaphors mix. The book as whole serves almost as an encyclopedia of the sonnet's possible violations while still remaining a sonnet.” Despite all of the formal deviations in Mayer’s book that Spahr notes, the poems seem to come together to point back to some imaginary Ur-sonnet. Someone tell me what makes up the Ur-sonnet!

Last fall, while staying with the poet Nada Gordon, I finally got to read a copy of Mayer’s book, simply titled Sonnets. In an email, I asked Nada to tell me what she thought about Mayer’s sonnets and she responded by saying, “What I love is how they are at once formally disciplined and also fabulously casual. This was the beauty, I think of much of first generation New York School writing as well, and she inherited that touch. I think that sonnets in general are powerful because they speak to our (Western, at least) expectations about how ideas should unfold and convince.” Here’s one of my favorites from the book:

 

You jerk you didn’t call me up

I haven’t seen you in so long

You probably have a fucking tan

& besides that instead of making love tonight

You’re drinking your parents to the airport

I’m through with you bourgeois boys

All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts

Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but

Nowadays you guys settle for a couch

By a soporific color cable t.v. set

Instead of any arc of love, no wonder

The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time

 

Wake up! It’s the middle of the night

You can either make love or die at the hands of

the Cobra Commander

* * *

To make love, turn to Page 32.

To die, turn to Page 110.

V.                  Failure!

 My first attempts at writing the sonnet were as a nineteen-year-old undergrad. I wrote a sonnet about the fjords of Denmark. I wrote one about the mongoose. I wrote one or two about drinking on Sunset Boulevard. They were all awful. My friend, Rebecca Hazelton told me that her first attempt at writing sonnets was also as an undergrad. “My professor handed it back with one line circled, and said, "This line works." The rest was pretty dismal, but I was crushed. Didn't try to write another sonnet for years, but I did learn that sometimes you take one line from a poem and scrap the rest, so that was important.” My friend Justin Marks told me that he doesn’t think the sonnet is a “complete form.” He says, “I’ve done drafts where the poem is basically fourteen lines that feel like they go together but somehow don’t add up to anything. They have no movement to them, or don’t wind up anywhere.”  All of this gets me wondering whether or not the form is a “mature one,” more suited for an experienced poet. After all, Shakespeare was pushing thirty when he wrote his sonnets. So was Sidney and Elizabeth Barrett Browning was almost forty when she started writing the Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Kasey Mohammad, a Renaissance scholar, has written a book of sonnets called Sonnograms some of which are included in my GREAT BOOK. The poems are postmodern, Flarfy, anagrams of Shakespeare’s sonnets. When I taught Shakespeare last year, I had my students read them alongside Shakespeare’s and most of my students were horrified, arguing that Shakespeare’s sonnets are all about love and truth and those great eternal things and that Mohammad’s sonnets were “trashy” and “made no sense.” “Shakespeare was a genius!” they cried. Most of them thought Kasey’s poems were failures. But one or two of students LOVED his poetry, defending it on the basis of its novel use of formal constraints, humor, and contemporary “feel,” arguing that the poems are like Shakespeare but for their generation. What I enjoy is how the poet feeds Shakespeare’s language into a technologically-mediated landscape, uses his own “subjectivity” to rearrange the words and lines and ends up with an entirely new language that cannot escape carrying around the heavy burden of the forms of history. I leave you, finally, with the poet’s take on Sonnet 47 (“Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took”):

The the the the the the the the the the Death (Hey Hey)

 

Hell yeah, this is an English sonnet, bitch:

Three quatrains and a couplet, motherfucker.

I write that yummy shit to get me rich:

My iambs got more drive than Preston Tucker.

 

I also got that English rhyme shit straight,

That alternating shit the verses do.

Word: every foxy mama that I date

Feels how my goddam prosody is true.

 

And I don’t mess with no Italian shit;

I only blow your mind the one way, ho.

I line it up four-four-four-two, that’s it:

That’s how I do my sonnet bidness, yo.

 

My mad Shakespearean moves are “phat,” or “def”:

They weave my pet eel Lenny—what the eff?

Sandra Simonds grew up in Los Angeles, California. She earned a B.A. in Psychology and Creative Writing at U.C.L.A and an M.F.A. from the University of Montana, where she received a poetry fellowship. In 2010, she earned a PhD in Literature from Florida State University. Her second book of poems, Mother was a Tragic Girl, was published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2012. She is the author of Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009), which was a finalist for numerous prizes including the National Poetry Series. Her third book of poetry, House of Ions, is forthcoming from Bloof Books in 2014. She is the author of several chapbooks including Used White Wife (Grey Book Press, 2009) and The Humble Travelogues of Mr. Ian Worthington, Written from Land & Sea (Cy Gist, 2006). Her poems have been published in many journals including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The Believer, the Colorado Review, Fence, the Columbia Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Volt, the New Orleans Review and Lana Turner. Her Creative Nonfiction has been published in Post Road and other literary journals. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida with her partner, two children and two dogs and is an Assistant Professor of English at Thomas University in beautiful, rural Southern Georgia. Find out more about Sandra here.  Follow her on twitter @SandmanSimonds.